🎙️ OCE Hackathon 2025 | Tech & Testament Podcast
We’re excited to announce that Season 2 of the Tech & Testament podcast is live! This new season includes updates from the Innovation Lab and conversations with experts working toward Bible translation acceleration.
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About the Episode
Kicking off Season 2, Tech & Testament introduces what’s ahead for the show: updates from the ETEN Innovation Lab and stories from partners accelerating Bible translation.
This episode also highlights the 2025 Open Components Ecosystem Hackathon, where global developers explored the Theia platform as a foundation for multimodal tools. The teams showcased collaboration and growing local capacity for translation innovation.
Links from the Episode
For server access or questions: lab@eten.bible
Full Transcript
Hello, and welcome back to the Tech and Testament, a Bible translation innovation podcast. This show is produced by the ETEN Innovation Lab, and I am Isabella, your new host. Previously, we have explored multiple industry trends in the world of AI and their use in Bible translation. For what we are now calling season two of this podcast, you can expect to hear some direct updates of what the Innovation Lab has been up to. We will also have some guests joining us who are experts in the field of Bible translation from quality assurance researchers all the way to technologists and developers.
If you are part of Every Tribe, Every Nation, our collective impact alliance of Bible translation partners, you are hopefully aware of the All Access Goals. We envision that all people will have access to God's Word by 2033. The goals outline access to a full Bible, a New Testament, at least some portion of Scripture, or access to a second translation depending on the language group. At the current pace of world wide translation, we know that the all access goals would be accomplished only by 2043. That is a ten year delay representing Scripture accessibility gaps for multiple communities.
However, we do believe that together we can accelerate the current pace of translation and accomplish the all access goals. So the next logical question would be, how can acceleration happen? And this is what we are here to talk about in this podcast. As we speak, new tech and new methods are being tested and explored with the goal of overcoming Scripture poverty. There are several teams and partners who are leveraging emerging methodologies like the utilization of Assisted Translation Technologies including AI, Church and Community based quality assurance methods, or access to free and open resources.
We want to invite you to be an active participant with us on this journey. My hope is that these updates or stories from our guests will encourage you to join us in accelerating bible translation within ETEN and beyond. So let's get right into our updates for today. In the world of BT tools, the Open Components Ecosystem collaborators just wrapped up the 2025 Learnathon and Hackathon. To back it up a bit, if you have not heard of the OCE yet, it is a global community focused on collaborative innovation in Bible translation software.
The movement encourages creation of decentralized technologies with open source components that can be easily reused and expended. The Hackathon, which took place this February and March, is a two week sprint where developers can explore different solutions within the Bible technology space. They can learn new concepts and can also network with others in the Open Components community. For 2025, the theme was the exploration of Theia to make BT software development globally accessible. For some context, the Theia platform is a free and open source framework that's used for building desktop tools with AI capabilities.
It also features a customizable developer experience. Because of these characteristics, the OCE community wanted to explore if Theia would be a good fit for a Bible translation development environment. So what does a hackathon actually look like you might be asking? Well first there is a week of learning or the Learathon as we call it. And this is when different OCE participants presented ideas to help shape collaboration.
The presentations revolved around Theia, mobile app support, developer documentation and onboarding, web hosting support, and more. After this learning week, self forming teams of developers picked their own challenges and worked together to solve them. This really was an opportunity for the teams to follow creative thinking and to explore ideas outside of pre established boundaries. After working on the challenges, the 60 attendees from the twenty twenty five OCE Hackathon demonstrated the adoption of the Theia platform as a foundation for Bible translation tools. A key question was answered affirming that we could deliver an end to end multimodal translation tool in the platform pending further development.
A team from South America, before the Hackathon week even started, developed a proof of concept mobile app for oral Bible translation recording. This showcased Theia's use for mobile deployment. It was a significant breakthrough as local communities working on translation projects might only have access to mobile technology. There were several highlights throughout the week. There was a team from Asia who created an open bible stories editor extension with translation support.
Some of our collaborators from The US built an extension integrating with the Aquifer API for bible image management. And members from Venezuela developed a project management extension. But the biggest highlight of it all was not the exploration of the platform, it was actually the spirit of collaboration between the teams. Several organizations came together to share their learnings including Unfoldingword , BiblioNexus, Wycliffe Switzerland, and in-country partners. And while we won't name the in-country partners for safety reasons, there was a great turnaround.
Different from the past hackathons this time around, the majority of participants were from the global South. South Asia and South America were heavily represented indicating that we now have software developers who are much closer to the challenges and can solve local needs. We are celebrating how technology capacity is being built in the regions. Global participation is increasing and leading to a significant acceleration in translation tool development. And what's next after the hackathon?
Well, the next step is to deepen connections with the regional technology leaders, inviting even more software developers to see how their skills can contribute to the mission of Bible translation. Many technologists may not realize that their expertise can have a direct impact on making Scripture more accessible worldwide. By fostering stronger partnerships between translation organizations and local tech communities, the OCE and the Innovation Lab want to equip more developers with the tools, the resources, and collaborative opportunities to build innovative solutions for Bible translation. I invite you to go to the opencomponents.io website and learn even more about BT tools. You can also join the discord server and tell them that Isabella from the Innovation Lab sent you.
Please send us an email at lab@eten.bible for the server information. Well, this is a wrap for this episode. Let's stay connected so we can continue accelerating Bible translation together. This was Isabella and I will see you at the next episode of Tech and Testament.
We want to hear from you! The Lab is evaluating how we communicate and engage with partners, and we would love your input. Take a few minutes to complete our Communications Survey on Partner Engagement and help us improve how the Lab designs communication to equip partners for experimentation, utilization, and scaling new translation approaches.
In the article it is referred to as "Thea" which confused me.
Is the name of the platform Thea or Theia?