Second Eastern Partnership Civil Society Hackathon takes place in Minsk

On 1-3 June 2018 the EaP Civil Society Hackathon gathered in Minsk over 70 civil society representatives, IT professionals and designers from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine to work on software projects that would enable civil society better contribute to reforms in their home countries. For over two days the participants worked in hack teams of 3-4 persons on data research, ICT tools design and prototyping with the support of 11 mentors.

As a result of this intensive work, 20 project ideas designed by the civil society activists were worked through and turned into the prototypes of IT tools and solutions: web platforms, accountability tools, online and mobile applications. These include a wide range of services for journalists, active citizens and volunteers, people with disabilities and people in difficult situations, drivers and pedestrians, local communities and local authorities.

Following the voting by the participants and the independent jury four ICT tools were nominated for the EU Digitisation of Civil Society Award, a special facility that seeks to support the full-fledge development of the best ICT tool designed by the Hackathon participants. The nominees for the Award are:

• ProCancer – Chat bot that offers tools for cancer prevention, collection of medical data and forming the statistics
• Friendship Dictionary – on-line application to help journalists of online media reduce hostile language towards various minorities (gender, migrants, people with disabilities, etc.)
• Doika – module that helps to gather funds for NGO activity
• Lib4You – service for fast and easy search of libraries and rare books in libraries of Ukraine

The four nominees will be invited to apply for the Award within the Restricted Call for Applications in June 2018. The hackatons are meant to foster the development of ICT tools for transparency, accountability, digital participation and public services, to be used by civil society organisations in their work. A Hackathon is a collaborative interactive workshop resulting in the development of software solutions that can be used by civil society actors to address specific social issues.

The EaP Civil Society Hackathons also hope to facilitate the establishment of long-term cooperation between local civil society and IT community that would results in developing new ICT tools to empower digital participation of citizens, to improve transparency and communication of governmental decisions and spending, to enable broader participation in decision making process and to advance public services. More details about 2018 EaP Civil Society hackathon: www.ict.eapcivilsociety.eu