Announcing the finalists of the 2020 Presidential Hackathon

Seven teams from Central America, Colombia, India, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Taiwan, and Ukraine have been selected to develop their projects during this year’s Presidential Hackathon, an innovation challenge by the Open Contracting Partnership and the Taiwanese government. 

These projects propose innovative solutions that use open data in public procurement to address specific problems to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. We’ve been impressed by the diversity of proposals from around the world, confirming that procurement has a key role in identifying solutions to critical development questions.  

Here are the projects and teams:

• CoST – the Infrastructure Transparency Initiative in Latin America proposes a solution to monitor health infrastructure development by linking open data across Central America. 
• The team Learning Man will build a social housing map, an informative tool for the federal and local governments of Taiwan as well as the public, using procurement data on social housing.
• Syntech Arrow from Malaysia will build an intelligent monitoring system to link roads to their contractors and assess the quality of the infrastructure, including citizen’s ratings. 
• The team Keep Our Country Clean will build an integrated platform to identify potential solutions and develop infrastructure capacity for dealing with solid waste and garbage in Nicaragua.
• From Ukraine, team Market Research Tool will build a new tool to support market research for the pricing of protective equipment and critical materials during the COVID-19 pandemic. 
• CivicDataLab’s Fiscal Force team from India will connect budgets with infrastructure procurement in a new Himachal Fiscal Data Explorer.
• Colombia’s Datasketch will build a cloud-based OCDS multi-language public contract visualization and analysis tool to allow non-technical users to create automated dashboards for procurement monitoring.

The Taiwan Presidential Hackathon is a global innovation challenge. It promotes open-source, open data, and open government best practices to address governance, economic and social needs. Public contracts matter when designing policies that enable sustainable development. Investment in infrastructure, goods and services such as schools, hospitals and roads, or medicines, energy or sanitation services are all critical to ensure better lives for citizens. These constraints are exacerbated by climate change and severe weather events that further increase inequalities. There is a serious lack of open data and accessible tools to help track progress, assess risks from external factors such as weather events, identify the best solutions, and make decisions based on the best information. The Presidential Hackathon will help address this gap. 

The teams will pitch their solutions after a seven-week development and training phase. The two winners will win $5,000 and present their solutions to the Presidential palace.

About the Open Contracting Partnership

The Open Contracting Partnership is a silo-busting collaboration across governments, businesses, civil society, and technologists to open up and transform government contracting worldwide. We bring open data and open government together to make public contracting fair and effective. Spun out of the World Bank in 2015, we are now an independent not-for-profit working in over 30 countries around the world. We help make reforms stick and innovations jump scale, and foster a culture of openness about the policies, teams, tools, data, and results needed to deliver impact.