The fifth edition of the Hackathon for Good has a new winner! Teams from all over the world worked for 48 hours straight to tackle today’s biggest challenges related to sustainability, privacy, open government and corruption.

Jan van Zanen, mayor of The Hague officially opened the Hackathon for Good on Friday November 25 with the words: “The programmers at this event will be looking at real questions, dilemmas, and challenges, and the aim is to arrive at practical solutions. (…) There are 48 hours to exchange knowledge and ideas, to be inspired, to find ways of applying digital technologies that will make the world just a little bit better.”.

The Hackathon for Good started in 2018 as a collaborative project between governments, universities, entrepreneurs and knowledge institutes committed to peace, justice and security. The Hague was the evident place to host the hackathon due to its leading position in international law and human rights. The Hague Tech, in collaboration with WorldStartup are organizing the hackathon to: “accelerate innovation and entrepreneurship, but also adopt innovation for building a better world” as Olga Wielders, Co-Founder of The Hague Tech explained.

5 teams were competing in the finals and presented their solutions to a renowned jury. The jury included:

- Jill Wilkinson - Managing Director Humanity Hub

- Isabel Barberá - Privacy Engineer at Rhite

- Joris den Bruinen - Director HSD

- Bram de Bruijn - Director Beyond Products

“It was inspiring to see all of the hackers contributing towards the overall goal of creating positive change. Tech absolutely can be a means for good, and events like this, and those who attend, are proof of this.”

Rebecca Jurgens – Tenth Revolution Group

Finalists

The jury took up the challenge to select a winner out of 5 amazing concepts.

1. Challenge: Business Intelligence for Sustainable Flower Production

by LG Flowers & Greenport

The Poppys team designed and built a dashboard to provide all information to flower growers, enabling them to make more sustainable decisions. Information includes weather data, energy costs, flower prices, Google trends and market price forecasts.

https://azucenamv.shinyapps.io/Poppys/

2. Combat International Corruption using Open Data

by Integrity Initiatives International

The The Innocents team created a corruption monitor that shows relevant data combined with valuable insights, making it easy for corruption investigators, legal experts, and journalists to identify complex corruption schemes quickly.

3. Future of Greenhouse Energy & Heat Efficiency

by Greenport & Provincie Zuid-Holland

The M3 team created a platform called GreenNet to support greenhouse growers transition to a more sustainable way of managing their heating, energy, and cooling demands.

4. Anonymisation of Sensitive Data on Social Media

by 510: an initiative of the Netherlands Red Cross

What-the-Hack supports the Red Cross teams with a smart tool to translate written language, highlight information which is potentially sensitive, and remove these sensitive data.

5. Assess The Impact of Governmental Policies Before They Get Introduced

by Municipality The Hague

The North Sea Sharks present OPEN STAD to facilitate the collaboration between governments and local enterprises by implementing open-source principles.

OPEN STAD identifies potential businesses which are impacted by new policies (e.g. new parking policies within The Hague). It randomly selects representatives from each potentially affected business sector which receive notifications to review the policy and either approve, or request changes.

Announcing the final winner

After a long discussion, the jury eventually choose The North Sea Sharks with their solution OPEN STAD as the winner of the 5th edition of the Hackathon for Good! Congratulations to: Alexey Budiak, Alexey Udalov, Sergey Kim & Uladzimir Mihura.

Next hackathon

Big shoutout to our partners