Sydney - In a small room close by the Sydney Opera House, 60 people representing a vast range of communities and industries are working feverishly to come up with ways to combat the Islamic State group's online propaganda machine.
The extremists' ideology and use of social media has struck a chord with thousands of youngsters across the world, drawing them to fight in Iraq and Syria or show support from their home countries.
The United States and its allies have struggled to counter the digitally savvy group, but a pair of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are leading a grassroots-charge to take on IS in cyberspace, travelling around the world to host hackathon challenges.
The latest hackathon competition -- the fourth in the past five months -- is being held alongside a two-day countering violent extremism conference in Australia's biggest city, attended by high-level officials and experts and opened by Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
The anti-extremism meeting is taking an in-depth look at how IS -- which controls large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria -- reaches out to youths, with technology giants Facebook, Twitter and Google joining the more than 30 participating countries in hashing out solutions.
Almost 25,000 foreign fighters from over 100 countries were involved in jihadi conflicts worldwide, a recent United Nations report said, with many headed for Iraq and Syria. Some of those making the journey include teenage boys and girls.
The hackathon is designed to take an additional approach to countering IS.
"We marry innovation and the national security sector, with Silicon Valley ethos and start-up models to try and create very new, fast-paced, high-energy (projects)," said hackathon organiser Quintan Wiktorowicz, who was US President Barack Obama's senior adviser for countering violent extremism from 2011 to 2013.
"No single prototype is a silver bullet to stop ISIS radicalisation. But it's the ecosystem that we're building by running these (hackathons) globally and connecting the networks all the time," he told AFP, using another term for IS.
"Over five years, it can be a game changer, it can have strategy impact."
The projects being developed do not have to address radicalisation head on, but are meant to focus on the root causes of why young people choose to leave home, such as feeling disconnected from local communities.
AFP
