We organise a series of EaP Regional 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!
2023 EU-EaP Civic Tech Acceleration Hackathon NEW!
We return with the fifth edition of the EaP Civil Society Hackathons, and invite civic tech enthusiasts from the EaP countries to register for our 2023 EU-EaP Civic Tech Acceleration Hackathon to boost their civic tech solutions from prototypes to products! The 2023 Hackathon will be held online on 12 May – 10 June 2023. It will be focused on enhancing existing prototypes of digital solutions designed by civic tech teams from the six Eastern Partnership countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. In the best traditions of start-up accelerators, 15 teams of civic tech projects will work with mentors and IT professionals & graphic designers from EaP and EU to improve their prototypes and compete for the 2023 Civil Society Digitalisation Award, a special facility to support the full-fledged development and launch of one (or more) civic tech solution proposed by the 2023 Hackathon participants. The expected average amount of support per a winner is EUR 10,000; up to EUR 12,000 may be awarded on an exceptional basis.
To apply for participation in the 2023 EU-EaP Civic Tech Acceleration Hackathon please register here. The deadlines for submission of applications:
- If you apply on behalf of your team with a civic tech solution prototype, please apply before 24 April 2023!
- If you are an IT professional or a graphic or web designer interested in helping the teams, please apply before 1 May 2023!
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.