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.

• Data-Based Education Challenge: Ranking schools across districts
  
  Develop an application that ranks entire districts based on the performance of their primary and secondary level schools
  
  

• Women & Tech: Zariya - Women's safety and incident reporting
  
  Build an app that leverages access to technology to 1) improve the under-reporting of violent crimes against women and 2) to enhance access to justice
  
  

• Civic Data Challenge: Tracking price of everyday commodities
  
  Use the historical consumer price index to determine whether the affordability of essential goods for the average lower-middle class family has increased or decreased with time

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

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

• 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?