Our third EaP Civil Society Hackathon – 2019 was held in Tbilisi (Georgia) on 14-16 June 2019 in partnership with the Georgian Innovation and Technology Agency. 70 civil society activists, designers and IT experts from Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine worked together to create digital tools to enable civil society organisations and activists better serve the needs of their communities and help citizens participate in decision making processes in their countries. Participants worked on 20 project ideas to design and create web and mobile applications for healthy life, e-transparency services, educational online games for kids, crypto currency online platforms, websites for analysis of open data, interactive maps for communities’ needs, crowdfunding and crowd-sourcing platforms and modules, etc.
As a result, three ideas of digital solutions for cleaner environment, better health and accessibility for all were nominated for the EU Digitalisation for Civil Society Award by the participants and mentors of the 2019 EaP Civil Society Hackathon:
- GLUTEN FREE ASSISTANT, a web portal with multiple modules for collecting information about food and drugs, adding verified data and user reviews and forming a gluten-free community;
- PROVODNIK, an interactive map for people with special needs to help them find best and safest routes, enjoy more active lifestyle and ultimately, spur development of inclusive urban infrastructure. The map will also allow users to mark locations without necessary inclusive infrastructures, rate accessibility of places and send in automatic requests (problem reports) to government bodies to solve the problem;
- RUBBISH, an online game to teach children how to care about the environment and responsibly deal with garbage sorting. A survey carried out in Minsk revealed three main problems: lack of motivation to separate waste collection; lack of awareness; and poorly developed urban infrastructure.
And we are happy to announce the Winner of the 2019 Award – the Ukrainian project Interactive Map PROVIDNYK by Anna Krys from Ukraine!
This year we received over 65 applications with ideas seeking to improve the life of communities and people in the EaP countries. Before the Hackathon we shortlisted 32 brilliant ideas and first invited their authors to Kyiv on 24-25 May for the Regional Ideathon – an incubation meeting for civil society activists bringing them together with hackathon mentors to work on their projects.