Virtual Ukrainian Open Data Hackathon

Welcome to the Virtual Ukrainian Open Data Hackathon

What's involved?

To scale up this event we decide to organise a Virtual Ukrainian Open Data Hackathon. It is a virtual team idea/prototyping competition, organized by Tech London Advocates Ukraine, for students and professionals worldwide. You can sit in Kyiv, Mariupol or Zhmerynka and still participate in our event. Are you in New York or Tokio? Not a problem at all to hack for Ukrainian social good with us. Even sunny Honolulu or Phuket can join us since our Virtual Hackathon is truly borderless.
You pick your dorection, team and work on a solution for the Challenge, explained below.

Virtual Hackathon Theme

The curiosity for (1) Open Data, (2) Ukraine and all things related to open innovation, collaboration, and sharing of ideas without borders to promote the tech ecosystem.

What is a Virtual Hackathon anyway?

If you've never heard of a hackathon - don't let the name put you off, it's not that type of hacking!

A hackathon (in our case, we can even call it “ideathon”) is a platform for innovative ideas that aim to solve a particular problem. It's a competition where people from all walks of life come together in teams to collaborate, build applications or design assets.

Attendees come with an existing idea to pitch or can join other ideas being pitched to work. As an outcome of our event, we will have a bunch of ideas or even working models to take on a Challenge. Any code or software stuff with permission of the teams will be available as open-source in our GitHub.

What do you need to do at the Virtual Hackathon?

1) Build any app you want. Create any design you want. Develop any idea you want.

2) Shoot your demo video, take screenshots of your creations or document your idea.

3) Wait for our judges to find the best one. And in the meantime talk to us, send us quesitons, get a cup of hot tea.

What is the Challenge?

Participants can choose to work on a combination of any of the following work-streams:

Business Climate

• How Might We elevate Ukrainian small businesses and investment into Ukraine?

Set the Record Straight

• How Might We promote the correct usage of linguistics and raise awareness on cultural knowledge of Ukraine? (#KyivnotKiev, ‘Ukraine’ not ‘the Ukraine’)

Clean Data Indicators

• How Might We boost and keep open data indicators up to date, correct, and automate the detection of any errors?
  
  

What datasets do we have?

Our Partner, Refinitiv Labs, provides free access to data, metadata and sample Jupyter notebooks for many of the most popular sets including Tick History, Historical Pricing, Reuters News Archive, Aggregated News & Social Media Sentiment, ESG and Knowledge Graph. It also provides access to the Intelligent Tagging Natural Language Processing and Symbology services.

Also, every participant will get access to Open Datasets Catalogue within the Ukrainian Ecosystem (mostly - in Ukrainian).

What will I do there if I am not a techie?

We welcome anyone whether you have a background or interest in business, design, social development, education, charity, economics, user experience, coding, culture, ecology - or if you want to experience something new, your ideas will be a great contribution to the team!

We'll try to make sure every team has at least one Ukrainian speaker, in case you come across data that doesn't have an English translation to it.

Do I need to be from Ukraine to participate?

Absolutely not. The event is open to anyone with an interest in using data, tech, and ideas to solve challenges for social good.

Do I need a team beforehand?

Not necessarily. You can come individually or as a team. You will be able to join the team whose idea you'd like to help work on. The goal is to come up with a proposal or prototype at the end of the hackathon and present it in front of a panel of judges.

We'll be asking attendees to form teams with a minimum of 3 and a suggested maximum of 6 (but no more than 8) members.

Anyone will have a chance to pitch their idea(s) at the start of the event on Friday evening, after which the teams will be formed. You will be working with your team over Saturday, and present at the end of the day.

How can I participate in the event?

Via your laptop.

Since our Hackathon is virtual, this format opens endless possibilities to participate and collaborate.

How can I contact the organiser with any questions?

Please, feel free to message us via Twitter or Facebook.

Social Networks?

Use the Twitter name @TLA_Ukraine and tag #LondonTechUkraine and for tweets related to the Hackathon.