The international event “Connecting Doers with Opportunity” took place in Timișoara, Romania, between the 5th and the 8th of October 2017. It was made up of an International Urban Talks Conference and an Innovation Hackathon focusing on two topics: the future of the community and the future of sustainable production based on the Blockchain technology.
KeepItSimple and UrbanizeHub Romania brought together active and engaged people from all over the globe, showing that there is a major interest in strengthening communities, as well as making them better-connected and more dynamic. 8 teams participated in the Innovation Hackathon, 4 for each topic.
The projects that these teams managed to come up with and eventually present, illustrated how each group envisioned a better, safer and more sustainable future. Participants were competing for prizes such as $10,000 in crypto-currency, and the possibility of presenting their ideas in front of United Nations Representatives.
Winners
The Future of Community:
Captured 1.0 – a system that helps visualize and perform risk analysis on corruption levels in public acquisitions. The prototype that was built in 36 hours managed to gather data for an entire country during a 4-year time span, in 4 different, high-value national public acquisition markets.
The concept can be further developed into a visualizing and real-time risk analysis platform dealing with corruption risk within public acquisitions in 35 different countries. The project will have the chance of being presented in front of a United Nations Committee.
The other projects running in this category were:
- Hand2Hand – a user-friendly app designed for the management of necessary resources after a natural disaster
- No Fake News – an add-on that invites users to classify information sources according to their level of reliability
- ZeroCozi – an app that keeps live track of queues in different institutions, also allowing for a virtual ticket to be printed, informing the user of the estimated time he or she must be present in the queue
The Future of Sustainable Manufacturing using Blockchain:
All the 4 teams that participated in this category received prizes in crypto-currency, as the jury decided to pair up projects that are complementary and that could grow further together.
The first prize was therefore split between two projects (TrustChain and OpenRetail) that seek to simplify the foreign exchange market through more intelligent, more transparent and safer transactions in Blockchain. Both teams won $6000 worth of crypto-currency.
The second prize, consisting of about $1500 worth of crypto-currency for each team, was split between Disrupting the Supply Chain and GreenChain. The first project attempts to simplify 3D printing using Blockchain, while the second one tries to improve the knowledge as well as the responsibility regarding the life cycle of every product.
Lykke, Banat IT and Innovation 4.4 were our partners for the event, while the prizes were offered by Lykke, a Blockchain technology company.
Following the resounding success of the event, the organizers are already planning on designing similar ones in Iași, Cluj and Bucharest in 2018.
