NITA celebrates International Open Data Hackathon day | VibeGhana.com

"The National Information Technology Agency (NITA), has joined the international community to celebrate the International Open Data Hackathon Day, in Accra, on the theme: 'Better Tools, More Data, Bigger Fun'. The programme, which was celebrated worldwide brought a gathering of citizens in cities to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption of open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments. A statement issued by NITA, copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra, said participants were exposed to new ways of solving and analyzing problems using open public data, and provided them the needed resources to discover, define and propose new ideas via on online application form. Participants also gathered ideas on public data to develop key values and innovation that play important role in the Hackathon Day and a list of 11 ideas received pitches from the participants of which the project dimension of each category was voted to choose the best one. The statement said participants hacked, coded, compiled data, built and developed apps from a randomly generated list of six topics on graduate unemployment, education, government expenditure, crime, transportation and health before presenting their project at various stages of the completion to a panel of judges. Mr. William Tevie, Director General of NITA, said only the best project applications would get the chance to win a grand prize of five hundred Ghana cedis. The event experienced presentations from experts and trainers from Information Technology vendors providing ample opportunities for participants to learn, network, innovate on what a Hackathon Day is all about. It said the majority of the participants said they planned to continue developing their applications in the future, adding that it was incentive enough to learn application development themselves. Mr. Eric Akumiah, Director of Operations – NITA and GODI, said it was inspiring to know that the event was a catalyst for such creativity and innovation. The event was sponsored by Rlg Communications Ghana and Sahara.NET with support from Mobile Web Ghana, Vodafone, NITA and the Advanced IT Institute as joint organizers of the event. GNA ..."