Jakarta’s Smart City initiative is growing and the citizens are being directly involved in the government’s efforts to transform Jakarta, through hackathons. Hackathons are software development competitions focused towards a particular topic set by the organisers. Over the past 2 years, 8 hackathons have been held in Indonesia.
HackGov to Empower Indonesia
HackGov, following the theme of “Empowering Indonesia”, aims to involve coders and innovators from the general public to come up with solutions to improve society as a whole.
This hackathon uses public data in Indonesia and follows several others held in the past couple years. It is believed that the increase in hackathons has led to a great impact on Indonesia’s civic-tech timeline.
The hackathon was held over the weekend, 27-29 November at Gajah Mada University and Eastparc Hotel in Yogyakarta Indonesia.
The event was organized by the Ministry of National Development Planning (Bappenas), the United Nations, and Pulse Lab Jakarta.
The competition included 70 separate teams with over 200 participants in total. Teams were comprised of 2 to 3 people who have a range of experience, working on creating solutions within a total 24 hours. These participants were challenged to use innovative ideas to help social and government problems.
The hackathon participants were tasked to come up with innovative solutions to overcome 3 challenges, those being: access to data sources, effective interpretation of data, and responsible user of data.
The winners of the hackathon for each category were: Simpleo for Visualisation and Analysis by capturing the data between municipal data and birth mortality; Circustudio for Societal Aspirations by creating an app to measure water pollution; Devover for Best Design by creating the app 'Emak' focusing on better investment; and Womenesia for Best Concept.
Indonesia- United Nations Partnership for Development Framework
Bappenas recently hosted the signing of the Indonesia- United Nations Partnership for Development Framework (UNPDF) 2016-2020. This Framework acts to support the achievement of strategic goals and national priorities through the Indonesia Government’s cooperation with the United Nations.
Critical foci of the framework include issues such as maternal mortality and social inequality. This partnership works to strengthen sustainable development measures in Indonesia, through the mobilization of global resources and experts from public, private, and non-profit sectors.
Douglas Broderick, UNDP Resident Coordinator, emphasised that Indonesia has acted as a leader in the promotion of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on local and international levels. This is due to their active integration of the SDGs within several national development plans.
Technology is an important asset to the UNPDF as it enables the government to raise the standard of living for citizens, while addressing sustainable development goals in the process. Hackathons and Strategic Partnerships alike will help boost the technological capacity of citizens, bringing a smarter and more sustainable future to Indonesia.
