Charleroi to host the biggest Walloon hackathon

Since 2016, FuturoCité and its partners have organized the Smart Region Digital Wallonia hackathon every year. In 5 editions, it brought together around 350 participants, representing 67 projects and 36 teams. The Citizens of Wallonia hackathon is therefore, by its size, the largest Walloon hackathon bringing together participants between 20 and 40 years old from all over Wallonia.

“After Mons and Liège, FuturoCité asked the City of Charleroi to organize its 2022 edition in Charleroi. The hackathon would take place at the premises of E6K A6K in the lower town, a neighborhood that increasingly brings together the digital ecosystem. The organization of this event in Charleroi demonstrates our political will to put the first Walloon metropolis on the digital map and to turn it into a real Smart city by 2024”, explains the alderman of Digital Development, Eric Goffart. 

A contraction of the words hacking and marathon, a hackathon is a competition for (IT) developers, organized by teams to create functional application prototypes in a few hours/days on a specific theme. 

The themes tackled during this hackathon are those of “Smart Cities” – more generally, the objective is the development of concrete IT solutions to improve the daily lives of citizens. 

“We open up the field of possibilities by asking them to answer the following question: How to facilitate / improve the daily life of the citizen? In terms of mobility, interaction between citizens and administrations, energy management, health, access to employment, security, access to education, etc.“, specifies Nicolas Installé, director of FuturoCité. 

The Citizens of Wallonia hackathon is the ideal opportunity for everyone to submit a project and find developers to carry it out, use your talents as a developer to benefit from Smart Cities, even without an idea, access a dialogue platform for citizens and public bodies, discover a complete creativity process, learn new tools and technologies and take a first step in starting a start-up. 

“The first particularity of our hackathon, besides the fact of mobilizing a large number of participants, is the audience to which it is addressed. Indeed, unlike traditional hackathons mainly made up of IT specialists, this one is open to all citizens (technicians of course, but also students, start-ups, entrepreneurs, public sector, creatives, project leaders, etc. …). And of course the Walloon towns and municipalities are invited to collaborate in different ways to the challenge, for example by sharing their issues and project ideas to fuel reflection. This diversity in roles and profiles makes it possible to set up projects that are particularly rich in terms of diversity, creativity or purposes”, continues Nicolas Installé. 

At the end of the 2 days of collaborative work, on Sunday at the end of the afternoon, the teams “pitch” and demonstrate their solution in front of a generalist and technical jury who rewards them. Approximately 10 prizes will be awarded (Gamification Prize, Pitch Prize, Best Service Prize for the Citizen, Smart Territory Prize, IoT Prize, Artificial Intelligence Prize, Data Prize, Code Prize, Business Prize, Smart Region Digital Wallonia Prize).