BTNG Hackathon 2018: Day 1
Hacking running elections in Nigeria
Today, was a freezing cold Saturday morning here in London.
But that did nothing to deter an eclectic collection of people who join forces together – to solve issues around running successful elections in Nigeria.
We heard lots of interesting pitches focusing on varying practical and urgent areas such as election transparency, verification of voters identity, trusted data results, to name a few. After the pitches, the following teams were formed:
Team Name: Freedom Fighters
Product Name: Oju
Solution: Crowd sourcing platform to empower voters to keep each other safe!
Interesting fact: ‘Oju’ means eye in Yoruba language and the Freedom fighter’s underlying thesis is that many ‘eyes’ will help to keep voters out of harm’s way.
Team Name: Mojiyo
Product Name: Mojiyo
Solution: An election transparency platform for observers and users.
How it works: To report the status of the elections, Mojiyo functions via SMS or USSD – to report what’s going in the vicinity.
Team Name: Team 9
Product Name: 9ja
Solution: A method to improve transparency and integrity of the voting system.
Big Idea: An algorithm that verifies polling results in real time.
Team Name: Coll@te
Product Name: Coll@te
Solution: Collects big data on elections process in Nigeria.
Why it matters: They’re working on a Nigerian solution which works both offline and online to ensure that robustness of data is guaranteed.
Team Name: Face the Vote
Product: Face
Solution: A platform using face recognition to solve issues around multiple voting in Nigeria.
How it works: Multiple voting happens in Nigeria. Face uses facial recognition to support INEC’s current process to eliminate this vexing problem.
Team name: Grounded
Product: My Vote My Way.
Solution: Working on providing a ‘trusted voting identity’ in Nigeria.
Why it matters: Access to polling stations can be tricky and tedious. People queuing up for hours. And ballot boxes being stolen. ‘My Vote My way’ proposes a solution where your identity is verified and secured to vote in different ways.
Team Name: Debt
Solution: A voter fraud prevention platform in Nigeria.
Big Idea: Verify voters using cross validation to existing government issued documents e.g ID cards, passport, etc. with encryption first approach.
It wasn’t just a London affair as We Code from Abuja provided three teams who also participated live via Skype to hack solutions.
Team E-voting: Utilise block-chain algorithm to identify voters and their votes.
Team Election Monitoring: A solution to collate and display results at polling units using human observers.
Team Flowes: Building an Election Process Hub which is a geo-spatial and location intelligence solution for electoral regulators.
In usual hackathon fashion, it wasn’t all about hacking. Loads of pizza, ping pong and partnerships went down!
It’s only Day one but special thanks to all our participants. We of course appreciate the enormous support from the good folks at Microsoft Reactor, CcHub, PrognoStore, The Times, Stears Business, We Code, and Bethnal Green Ventures. Let’s do this again tomorrow!
Cheers,
BTNG Team
