Well, me and my friends attended this Hackathon on VAW some months back. I thought to write about it back then but I didn't had time. So, now let's talk about it. Hackathon is basically a collaboration of computer programmers, designers to make some applications, web portals or any useful software within a defined time. In our case the time was about 8 hours (a day). This hackathon was based on gender violence and mostly focused on violence against women. The first thing to do was to register our team and to pitch an idea on what problem are we looking into and how will we try to make a solution for it.
We pitched a simple idea that we had thought of a day ago which was to map all the NGOs working for the Women Sector in different districts of Nepal. After pitching our idea, me and my group (Team Young) began to work swiftly. The first thing was to get the data to map. The data was put on Social Welfare Council, Nepal as a pdf file. After some work the PDF was converted to open data format CSV which could be easily imported to a database. After doing this I began to work on the mapping. My other team members were working on the design and SMS based service for the portal as many people in Nepal don't have access to the internet but do have a mobile phone. The SMS API was provided free that day by Sparrow SMS - leading company for VAS services in Nepal. After some hours of serious collaboration and teamwork we were able to finish our work in time. The mapping was completed and the SMS based service was working fine too. The front-end was done using Foundation. Whereas, the back-end was done with PHP and MySQL. For mapping, JavaScript library leaflet.js was used.
The work we had done in these 8 hours was satisfying for all of our team members. After this we had a short presentation to impress the judges with what we've done. The presentation went quite well. We were the first team to present among the 18 teams that were participating in the event. The winner was then announced. We had a hope that we could make it into the top 3 but sadly we didn't make it. It was disappointing but the experience we had was worth more than winning. To know more about the event and winners please visit http://vawhack.org
The event was organized by World Bank Nepal along with co-organizers Young Innovations Pvt. Ltd. and Computer Association Nepal. Large amount of people and CSO(Civil Society Organizations) were involved in the event along with many volunteers. The event was a major success and it was great fun to be a part of such a event.
The project can be found on GitHub as: VawNepal
We pitched a simple idea that we had thought of a day ago which was to map all the NGOs working for the Women Sector in different districts of Nepal. After pitching our idea, me and my group (Team Young) began to work swiftly. The first thing was to get the data to map. The data was put on Social Welfare Council, Nepal as a pdf file. After some work the PDF was converted to open data format CSV which could be easily imported to a database. After doing this I began to work on the mapping. My other team members were working on the design and SMS based service for the portal as many people in Nepal don't have access to the internet but do have a mobile phone. The SMS API was provided free that day by Sparrow SMS - leading company for VAS services in Nepal. After some hours of serious collaboration and teamwork we were able to finish our work in time. The mapping was completed and the SMS based service was working fine too. The front-end was done using Foundation. Whereas, the back-end was done with PHP and MySQL. For mapping, JavaScript library leaflet.js was used.
The work we had done in these 8 hours was satisfying for all of our team members. After this we had a short presentation to impress the judges with what we've done. The presentation went quite well. We were the first team to present among the 18 teams that were participating in the event. The winner was then announced. We had a hope that we could make it into the top 3 but sadly we didn't make it. It was disappointing but the experience we had was worth more than winning. To know more about the event and winners please visit http://vawhack.org
The event was organized by World Bank Nepal along with co-organizers Young Innovations Pvt. Ltd. and Computer Association Nepal. Large amount of people and CSO(Civil Society Organizations) were involved in the event along with many volunteers. The event was a major success and it was great fun to be a part of such a event.
The project can be found on GitHub as: VawNepal
 |
| VAW Nepal - Screenshot |
