UrBC, Yekaterinburg, June 29, 2018. The social sector-oriented hackathon Socialhack Ekb will be held at Yekaterinburg’s Universitetsky Tech Park on July 7-8, 2018; the event is open to school and college students and young professionals.

The hackathon is meant to serve as a marathon/forum platform for teams of web developers who will work on a set of given IT problems non-stop. For Yekaterinburg, these would be apps for low-mobility citizens, open data processing, educational apps, and urban improvement solutions.

‘Digitalization is changing both the world at large and Russia in particular: our civil service web portals, digital maps, and smartphone apps have made people’s lives easier. However, everyday tasks we are still faced with make the need to bridge the gap between the IT developments and non-profit sectors ever more obvious. First of all, the non-profits lack the sufficient funds, of course. Secondly, they are not necessarily aware that there can be a software solution for their specific problem,’ says the hackathon organizer Anna Penkina.

Some sixty programmers, marketing experts, and designers — ten teams all in all — are expected to take part in the hackathon. The local non-profits will present their thoughts first, so that developers can be found for their projects. The teams will then embark on their respective projects, with short lectures and experts’ counseling sessions in between. Some experts come from the social projects community; others are experienced web developers, UI/UX designers, and presentation coaches. The forum will be held at Universitetsky Tech Park’s site.