Be it Islamabad or Karachi, we have civic problems! Do you want to bring a civic innovation revolution to Pakistan? Do you have ideas about how to fix things? Do you like working with other intelligent people? Have skills like web or mobile development or design? Want to innovate on top of government information and services? Apply your geek or creative skills to transforming your city for the better! 

We need to start innovating in public services if we want to see a change. Around the world, civic hackers are creating solutions that enable city governments to be more open, efficient, and in tune with the needs of citizens.

The Islamabad Civic Hackathon, much like the Lahore and Peshawar hackathons, will bring together programmers, designers, urban mappers, data analysts, community organizers, and government information to reboot local services by creating open source web, mobile, and SMS applications. Imagine a peace corps of geeks for civic betterment. Our tracks for the hackathon include women's empowerment, citizen to govt., govt. to citizen, citizen to citizen, civic data, from govt. submitted problems and for Islamabad specific solutions. 

During the 3-day Civic Hackathon, you will learn open-source hacking for civic good, get mentored, receive input from domain experts, and form teams to create useful prototypes that solve civic needs. All you need to do is bring your brain, skills, and enthusiasm!  

SOME CHALLENGES:

Here are some problem statements that were submitted by our sponsors and participants. You can start discussing these, as well as adding more problem statements in the Discussions section. You will have the opportunity to pitch these and other ideas in person, at the start of the hackathon.

 

Agenda for the weekend hackathon:

Friday (Team Formation): 5:00 PM to 9:30 PM

5:00 - 6:00 pm - Check-ins (Please arrive at 5 PM SHARP)

6:00 - 7:15 pm - Introduction to Civic Hacking

7:15 pm - Tea

7:30 - 8:30 pm - Project Pitches

8:30 - 9:30 pm - Team Formation

9:30 pm - Dinner

Saturday (Ideation & Design): 9 AM to 9 PM

9 am - Tea & Check-in

9:45 am - Agenda for the Day

10 - 11:30 am - Workshops

  • Main hall: Apps from KP Fellowship, GitHub, Smile SMS API, Design Thinking.
  • Civic Data room: Data Scrubbing, Creating Problem Solving Tools from a Dataset.

11:30 am - Judging Criteria

11:45 am - Team Ideation Starts

1:30 pm - Lunch

2 pm - Teams Continue Design & Ideation

4 pm - Tea

4:30 - 6:30 pm - Teams Review Design & Business Model with Mentors

6:30 - 7:30 pm - GitHub + Set up Hosting

7:45 pm - Logistics for Next Day + Start Hacking

8 pm - Dinner

Sunday (Coding & Demos): 9 AM to 9 PM

9 am - Tea & Check-in

9:45 am - Agenda for the Day

10 am - Teams Hack

12 - 2 pm - Team Mentoring

2 pm - Lunch

2 - 3:30  pm - Hacking

4 pm - Submissions due

4:15 pm - Tea

5 - 7 pm - Final Demos

7 - 8 pm - Speakers

8 pm - Prizes

8:15 pm - Next Steps

8:30 pm - Dinner

Participation in the Hackathon is FREE, but admission is open only to those accepted from the pool of applicants. Please do NOT register here if you were not previously accepted. 

The Islamabad Civic Hackathon will offer participants the opportunity to secure incubation for winning teams to create startups, financial support for the further development of some apps, as well the opportunity to become members of the Islamabad Civic Innovation Lab, to leverage an broad network to continue civic hacking. We will share further details at the event on how to join the Islamabad Civic Innovation Lab. 

SOME CHALLENGES:

Here are some problem statements that were submitted. You can start discussing these, as well as adding more problem statements in the Discussions section. You will have the opportunity to pitch these and other ideas in person, at the start of the hackathon.

View all challenges


RULES

Eligibility

  • Everyone with an idea was encouraged to apply to the Islamabad Civic Hackathon. We encourage diversity (gender, skillsets, backgrounds, both professionals and university students, etc.).
  • Participation in the Hackathon is FREE, but admission is open only to those accepted from the pool of applicants. Please do NOT register here if you were not accepted.

Requirements

When you’re ready to enter your submission, go to the isbhacks.challengepost.com homepage and click CREATE A SUBMISSION. You can also start this process and save a draft of your submission as you’re working on it.

  • Make sure to include good screenshots.
  • Write a clear, detailed description of your application.
  • Include the link to the GitHub repo.
  • Include the link to the prototype demo site.
  • We recommend not creating presentation slides, but instead focusing all your time on creating a functioning demo.
  • On the submission form, list all your team members by their ChallengePost user name.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

1st Place

2nd Place

3rd Place

Audience Favorite

Best App for Women's Needs/Empowerment

Best App for Govt-Submitted Problems

Best Solution Using Civic Data

Best Data-Based Education App

Special Mention

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

How to enter

Registration for this hackathon is only open to those who had previously applied and been officially accepted. Due to space constraints, we will have to remove anyone who registers here who is not on that admission list.

You can work on any idea that improves the public sector. Some broad categories to consider include Police and Public Safety, Traffic and Transit, Public Administration, Citizen Engagement, Public Health, Education, Agriculture, Energy and Utilities, Local Government, Disaster Management, Rescue Notification, Urban Development, Rural Development, and any other public domains. 

Prize categories for the hackathon include:

  • 1st place
  • 2nd place
  • 3rd place
  • Audience Favorite
  • Best Solution Using Civic Data
  • Best Data-based Education App
  • Best App for Women's Needs/Empowerment
  • Best App for Govt-submitted Problems

View More Details on the Civic Data & Data-Based Education Categories

Judges

Judge: Iqbal Khan

Judge: Iqbal Khan
President, Alachisoft

Judge: Azhar Rizvi

Judge: Azhar Rizvi
MIT Karachi

Judge: Asif Memon

Judge: Asif Memon
SDPI

Judge: Puruesh Chaudhry

Judge: Puruesh Chaudhry
Founder, AGAHI

Mentor: Saad Hamid

Mentor: Saad Hamid
Communications & Partnerships Lead, Invest2Innovate

Mentor: Babar Zahoor

Mentor: Babar Zahoor
Open Source Foundation

Mentor: Saman Naz

Mentor: Saman Naz
Alif Ailaan

Mentor: Dr Sibt-ul-Hussain

Mentor: Dr Sibt-ul-Hussain
NUST

Mentor: Shahzad Syed

Mentor: Shahzad Syed
Microsoft

Mentor: Tahir Masood

Mentor: Tahir Masood
Microsoft

Mentor: Dr Hamid Mukhtar

Mentor: Dr Hamid Mukhtar
SEECS

Mentor: Salman Farooq

Mentor: Salman Farooq
CEO, Smart Brain

Mentor: Saleem M Rafik

Mentor: Saleem M Rafik
Vice Chair, OSFP

Mentor: Tahir Mahmood Chaudhry

Mentor: Tahir Mahmood Chaudhry
Member Executive Council, OSFP

Mentor: Affan Syed

Mentor: Affan Syed
Associate Professor, FAST - NUCES / Founding Director, ORIC

Mentor: Faisal Chohan

Mentor: Faisal Chohan
Founder PakReport & Cogilent Solutions, Senior TED Fellow

Mentor: Arsalan Vardag

Mentor: Arsalan Vardag
JASB Consulting

Mentor: Sana Kazmi

Mentor: Sana Kazmi
Alif Ailaan

Judge: Nasir Mahmood Malik

Judge: Nasir Mahmood Malik
Focal Person IT, Planning Commission

Mentor: Sohaib Jamali

Mentor: Sohaib Jamali
Business Recorder

Mentor: Asad Hashim

Mentor: Asad Hashim
Al Jazeera

Mentor: Ali Raza

Mentor: Ali Raza
The World Bank

Mentor: Nabeel Zubair

Mentor: Nabeel Zubair
Mobilink

Mentor: Shanza Alam

Mentor: Shanza Alam
Product Marketing & Strategy Consultant

Mentor: Furhan Hussain

Mentor: Furhan Hussain
Bytes4all

Mentor: Muhammad Nasrullah

Mentor: Muhammad Nasrullah
VP Engineering, Convo, Cofounder: Pring, ByteSense

Mentor: Junaid Qureshi

Mentor: Junaid Qureshi
CEO, Lever Systems. Formerly at NADRA.

Judging Criteria

  • Problem-Solution Fit
    Is the problem well-defined? Is the solution a good fit for mitigating or resolving the issue?
  • Potential Impact
    How widespread is the community problem that the application intends to solve? Is there any market research on the problem and solution? Can the solution be scaled easily to actual deployment in the real world?
  • Novelty & Learning
    What is novel about the solution the team has proposed? Has it been done before? What will we learn from the solution that we didn’t already know before?
  • Prototype
    How easy-to-use is the application? How elegant and engaging is the user experience and design? How functional and well-implemented is the prototype demo?
  • Sustainability
    How committed is the team to scaling/deploying the application beyond the hackathon? How will the app be adopted by users (govt/citizens/media) & usage sustained over time? Does it have a business model?

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