On 25-27 November 2017, the EU-funded Eastern Partnership Civil Society Facility and the Prague Civil Society Centre held the CitizenLab 2017 Hackathon in Kyiv, Ukraine.
33 young civil society activists, designers and IT experts from 11 countries (6 EaP countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine – plus Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) gathered in Kyiv for a three-day immersive exercise to develop their ideas of civic projects and create prototype tools and applications to empower digital participation of citizens in the decision-making process.
Three days of intensive international collaboration on research, data collection and design culminated in development of 11 prototypes of web interfaces, portals, interactive maps, bots and mobile applications on a wide range of topics including segregated waste collection and disposal, air pollution monitoring, development of public spaces, police monitoring, territorial planning and mapping, participatory budgets, sex education for teenagers etc.
At the end of the event, a jury voted to select four projects from the EaP countries to apply for the EU Digitisation of Civil Society scale-up funding scheme. One of the four will have the opportunity to win additional funding from the EU’s Eastern Partnership Civil Society Facility for its further development. Projects from Armenia, Belarus and Ukraine were shortlisted.
The objective of the CitizenLab 2017 Hackathon was to empower digital participation of civil society in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, to improve transparency of public institutions and to enable broader citizen involvement in decision making processes. The Hackathon also contributed to sharing good local e-Democracy practices between civil society activists and provided an opportunity to build professional networks between civil society activists and IT experts and promote cross-border cooperation. The event was organised by the Prague Civil Society Centre with the financial support of the European Union through its Eastern Partnership Civil Society Facility.
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