From a Hackathon in Zaragoza to Google's Offices in New York: The Full Story of a Project That Keeps on Growing

Madrid. There are projects you deliver, and projects that transform you along the way. This is one of the latter. What began as "a hackathon, a challenge and an idea" ended up, in a matter of months, at Google's offices in New York, building on the data platform the United Nations has just opened to the world. This is the full chronology — to understand how our team got there.

Stage 1 — Zaragoza: the challenge that started it all

It all began at the 'Responsible and Open AI in Industry Challenge' hackathon, driven by the Spanish Government through SEDIA and AESIA. Malen Aguirre, Mencía González-Haba and Luis Bravo entered on their own initiative with Pasaporte Abierto, an open source solution enabling industrial SMEs to generate the Digital Product Passport and comply with European regulation. They won first prize — and with it, the ticket to represent Spain at the next event. The proposal even made it to South Summit in Madrid, hand in hand with SEDIA.

Stage 2 — New York: the UN and the birth of TrustBrief

In June, the prize materialised at the UN Open Source Week, at the United Nations headquarters in New York. There, within UNICEF's 'From Data to Action' challenge, the team took the idea one step further and TrustBrief was born — the AI copilot that verifies evidence against official databases to address reliability and ethics in artificial intelligence. The work didn't go unnoticed: the team received an invitation to keep developing it — and their more human vision of technology also reached the media, with the interview on COPE.

Stage 3 — Back to New York: the Builders' Day at Google

On September 22, Francisco Moreno Balboa, Luis, Malen and Mencía, together with SEDIA, took part in the UN System Data Commons Builders' Day, held at Google's offices in New York. And this is where the story gets especially interesting.

The United Nations has just brought together the statistics of 25 of its agencies in a single environment. Data that until now lived scattered across reports, sources and formats becomes connected, structured and ready for AI to work with — keeping every figure traceable — all built on Data Commons, Google's open source engine. The Builders' Day gathered the teams selected to design the first solutions on that newly opened foundation, and our project —generating reports with verified information, the natural evolution of TrustBrief— was one of them.

What this story says about how we work

Looking back, the curious thing is that at the start it was just that: a challenge and an idea. A few months later, that idea has passed through the United Nations and reached Google. And it wasn't an assignment from management — it was the initiative of a young team given context, trust and room to push. As Francisco puts it, you realise your company is growing when things happen that you don't control — but good things happen.

One important part of this story remains: what exactly they've built on the Data Commons. We'll tell you very soon. In the meantime, if you want to know what this same team can do with your organisation's data and challenges, let's talk.