DHAKATHON – Bangladesh's First Ever 'Hackathon for Elections' held
Bangladesh's first ever Hackathon for election called 'DHAKATHON' commenced last Friday at 10:30am at the Six Seasons Hotel in Gulshan, Dhaka. The event was jointly organized by The Asia Foundation and HiFi Public. This unique hackathon was aimed to provide a platform from which young participants could compete to provide useful and exciting online/mobile applications that will assist voters in accessing information relating to the City Corporation Elections. Over 80 enthusiastic participants joined the event, including students, faculty members of different universities, and employees of various ICT professional organizations.
The welcome speech was given by Kutub Uddin Kamal, Deputy Managing Editor, HiFi Public, who introduced the crowd to the event and explained the motive behind this initiative and what it aims to achieve. This was followed by an interactive briefing from Peter Yates, Project Manager, Elections Program, The Asia Foundation, who explained what concepts the participants could engage in with examples of such hackathons held in other nations across the world. After 48 hours of continuous coding, IITDU Coders was announced as the champions. They devised the app 'Vote for' which will inform voters about the basics of election, detailed bio of the candidates, polling stations and so on. Team RITL was as 1st Runners-up while Team Supernova won the title of 2nd Runners-up.
The event was supported by DFID, Sida, SDC and DANIDA.
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