On December 13, 2019, the opening ceremony of the annual open-data hackathon titled “Open Data Challenge 2019” took place in Turin Polytechnic University located Tashkent.

This annual event has been arranged by the State Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan on Statistics, the National Agency for Project Management under the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the Technological Park of Software Products and Information Technologies (IT Park), the OSCE Project Coordinator in Uzbekistan, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program in Uzbekistan, and the University of Turin in Tashkent city and Tashkent city Administration Office.

The “Open Data Challenge 2019” hakathon is an annual contest for developing applications by using available open data. It aims to form a professional community of software developers, cultivate relevant skills of state and local authorities’ representatives, as well as hackathon participants from different fields, actualize socio-economic potential of state and local authorities in the field of open data. Plus, a data journalism contest would be held as part of the hackathon following the training on “Data Journalism, Data Visualization, Software Data Processing”.

The following areas will be represented at the hackathon: open data for the public sector, social sector, business, their generation and transformation, as well as data journalism (a new flow in journalism based on the processing of data and its use to create journalistic paper).

The participants are expected to develop specific digital solutions (application, service, electronic device) using open data during the contest.

Application submitting process to the contest was carried out between October 1 to December 1, 2019. In total, around 400 applications have been received from all regions of Uzbekistan.

The most popular areas among applicants were open data for the social sector (30%), and then  open data for the public sector (29%), business (23%), and plus data transformation and generation (18%).

If to sum up by profession, applicants have been represented by programmers (68%), marketers (9%), designers (7%), product managers (4%), specialists in related industries (4%), and representatives of other professions (8%) . In the scope of event, participants listen to lectures related to open data; and prospects for its further development in Uzbekistan, data journalism and data generation.

In addition, leading professionals will also hold training sessions during the hacathon. In particular, Akmal Salikhov, a specialist and practitioner in the field of virtual reality (VR), will talk about tools for visualizing and manipulating data, as well as tools for developing VR applications. Sarvar Abdullaev will introduce the basics of data analysis using the Panda and ScikitLearn packages in Python. Jasur Khodjaeva will discuss the questions of filling in the gaps in data generation with the participants, and Arthur Pak-Vartanyan is going to share the skills related to the topic of presentation. It is also worth noting that international consultants Yuri Linkov, Irina Bernal, Stela Leuka from World Bank will join the event as mentors.