We organise a series of EaP Civic Tech Hackathons – special events that bring together civil activists and IT professionals from the Eastern Partnership countries to work face-to-face on civic tech solutions that would enable civil society to better contribute to reforms and democratic changes in their home countries.
Visit the Hackathon website for more details!
2024 EaP Civic Tech Hackathon
After two online editions, the 2024 Eastern Partnership Civic Tech Hackathon was held offline in Chisinau on 26-28 January 2024. This event brought together over 60 participants from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine – civil society activists, developers, designers, and IT experts, who formed 15 teams to develop civic tech solutions that address societal challenges and contribute to transparency, accountability, and improved public services in the Eastern Partnership countries. The Hackathon culminated on January 28th with the nomination of the most promising prototypes for the EaP Civic Tech Award through which the European Union supports the full-fledged development and launch of the best solutions proposed by the Hackathon participants. Five nominees competed for an average EU funding of 10,000 EUR that will help them bring their digital solutions ideas into reality. Two finalists of the 2024 EaP Civic Tech Hackathon, Hayk Asriyants from Georgia and Tatiana Arcan from Moldova have won the 2024 EaP Civic Tech Award and secured EU funding for the implementation and launch of their projects.
2023 EU-EaP Civic Tech Acceleration Hackathon
The 2023 EU-EaP Civic Tech Acceleration Hackathon was held online on 12 May – 10 June 2023. It was focused on enhancing existing prototypes of digital solutions designed by civic tech teams from the six Eastern Partnership countries. 12 talented teams from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine joined the intensive 4-week programme of our 2023 Hackathon on May 12. They came to the Hackathon with existing prototypes of digital solutions addressing the needs of communities, helping citizens to better hold their governments to account and leading to the improvement of public services in their home countries. This year six outstanding teams were preselected as finalists for the EU’s Civil Society Digitalisation Award and two digital solutions were selected to get the EU finding for development and launch.
2020 EaP Civil Society Hackathon
In response to the changed environment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 EaP Civil Society Ideathon and Hackathon was organised online for the first time in June-July 2020. The 2020 Online Regional Ideathon, took place from the 12th to the 28th of June. For two weeks civil society activists worked online with the mentors to improve and further develop their ideas. On the last days of the Ideathon, after the final pitching 16 ideas were selected for the next stage: Online EaP Civil Society Hackathon. For another three weeks 16 teams worked with designers, IT experts and mentors to develop the prototypes of mobile applications, online games and platforms to solve a wide range of problems in the Eastern Partnership countries. On the 1st of August the teams had their final pitches and the project team, mentors and other participants voted to select ideas of digital solutions to be nominated for the Digitalisation for Civil Society Award. This year, 7 solutions were nominated for the Award and two winners were selected.
2017-2019 EaP Civil Society Hackathons
Our previous, the third, EaP Civil Society Hackathon 2019 was held in Tbilisi, Georgia on 14-16 June 2019. In addition to that for the first time we organised the Regional Ideathon in Kyiv in preparation for the hackathon in June, which was meant to ensure that those ideas which are brought to the hackathon are feasible and sufficiently developed.
Our previous hackathons in 2017-2018 took place in Belarus in June 2018 and Ukraine in November 2017 and if you want to get a flavour of how the events unfolded, you can watch some of our hackathon videos here.
Since 2017, the best hackathon idea is presented with the Civil Society Digitalisation Award that seeks to support the full-fledge development of the tool designed by the best hackathon team. You can read more about the winners of Civil Society Digitalisation Awards in 2017 and 2018 here.
To promote the digital tools developed by civil society activists, programmers and designers from the Eastern Partnership countries participating in our regional hackathons we also created a Bank of IDEAS – a platform that presents a collection of ideas of ICT tools for better governance and e-Democracy. Learn more about the Bank of Ideas here.