Hack4SocialGood Promoting Digital Inclusion

Children's programme

To allow people with children to take part at the Hack4SocialGood, we are offering a flexible, supervised programme for children between 4 and 12 years on Saturday 1 April from 9:00 - 15:30.

• SPIKE Essentials: Programmable Lego Robots
• Blue-Bot: Programmable learning robot

Entry and closing possible at any time
Snack and brown bag lunch included
Registration required (see form)

In collaboration with PHBern
Sponsored by sozialinfo.ch

Soquflex is a small but powerful journal software that greatly simplifies the recording of client events in (small) institutions such as foster care. The software is currently based on Windows. We want to work out a smart and elegant way to modernize support planning, improving the existing journal software «Soquflex» and to lay the foundations of further developing the software as a responsive web application.

When teenagers seek personal help online, they are often unsuccessful – even though many organizations and government programs exist, that offer very high-quality support for a wide range of problems. How could we use AI to quickly connect teenagers with the best organization or person, that can help them solve their specific problems? What could be the best way to easily understand the teenager’s issue and match it with the appropriate support program?

We need to know the digital support needs of our target group to develop appropriate measures in our neighborhood work. How can digital competencies be surveyed in a low-threshold and meaningful way? How can the survey data be evaluated to guide program design?

C.2 - Web-based application for social services and support offers

Information work and low-threshold consulting services for disadvantaged neighborhood residents are among the core tasks of VBG. We are confronted with various social problems and try to triage them appropriately. We often find that there are many support services available, but that the target group is unaware of them and unable to find them independently due to a lack of basic skills (reading, digital literacy). A search mask for social topics, ideally in simple language and with a translation function, would make it much easier for many neighborhood residents to find appropriate services.

Sustainability Week Switzerland empowers students to advocate for greater sustainability by raising awareness, working on sustainability topics, and cooperating with relevant partners. Students organize Sustainability Weeks across Switzerland, each consisting of a series of events with diverse content covering ecological, social, and economic sustainability. As future decision-makers, students need to be prepared for the challenge of developing holistic approaches to achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. In this challenge participants examine the long-term impact of the Sustainability Week Switzerland network and determine how to strengthen strategies to motivate students with respect to developing their own knowledge and skills as well as improving their ability to advocate for a more sustainable future.

The app will allow users to choose options from a library of good deeds to fulfill and to share with the community. The hackathon team will be supported at the event by residents from old age homes and Bonjour staff (at start) to answer questions about the existing code. For a start, try the Grow App and take a look at the code. Then let’s get creative!

In this challenge we will try to improve our ability to consult and support clients in their everyday life by improving digital and data infrastructure. We will develop a concept and define the relevant technical requirements.

Gärngschee is a community of more than 23,000 people who work for each other and for others - especially those affected by poverty. Gärngschee runs diverse actions such as that for holiday season 22/23 in which people who do not have the means to buy gifts post their wishes online and others fulfill those wishes. The action is getting bigger every year and urgently needs automation. In this challenge participants will develop software to relieve the team and optimize the matching process.

In the context of a structural street redesign, it is important to enable the joint design of and subsequent use of (public) space. Through new digital communication tools and associated in-person exchanges or meetings, a network between the local actors (businesses, institutions, residents) should be established. This network should allow for the integration of diverse perspectives about space and its design to create the best possible community life along public corridors.

Skills: Programming, website design, urban planning, community engagement

Certaid brings together those seeking help and volunteers in the simplest and most straight-forward way possible. To do this, we need an online tool for registering volunteers and recording needs. We want to set a new standard for connecting people, and we want to break new ground to do it.

Winterhilfe is a Swiss non-profit organisation (NPO) in the field of private social care. The organisation supports people living in poverty in Switzerland. The main task of Winterhilfe is to bridge urgent financial emergencies with selective support services as well as the focused financial relief of tight household budgets. Requests for support are submitted by an application form. In order to keep pace with digitalisation, an online application form is to be created on our homepage, which can be filled out directly on the website and submitted together with all necessary documents.

Website development, data base, accessible interface design

We are developing a chatbot / conversational agent that answers voters' questions based on factual political data and not on propaganda (e.g. smart vote data). An example question is: "Which party did the most for gender equality in the last legislative period in the canton of Zurich?" We have found that out-of-the-box technologies like ChatGPT are good at answering general questions, but because they have been trained with texts from the media, they can give misleading results. Campax wants to use the latest research in NLP / ML / AI while providing clear, data-driven results provided by reliable sources like parliament.ch. To achieve this, we need proposals from the community for relevant projects.

Helvetas is a development organization; we have projects in 30 middle and low-income countries that focus on vocational training, clean water and sanitation, small businesses, community empowerment and more.

We collect data via KoboToolbox in our 30 country offices for projects such as vocational training, clean water, migration and government services. The Kobo surveys are in in 50+ languages. How can we translate the data so that it can be used for aggregate (worldwide) performance indicator dashboards in PowerBI? We are developing a user interface (UI) that will enable project staff to clean their Kobo data and submit it to the Data Lake. This translation could be embedded in the UI or done as part of the submission process from the UI to the Data Lake.

Skills: Data, KI/translation, data dashboards, development

Helvetas is a development organization; we have projects in 30 middle and low-income countries that focus on vocational training, clean water and sanitation, small businesses, community empowerment and more.

We collect data via KoboToolbox in our 30 country offices for projects such as vocational training, clean water, migration and government services. The Kobo surveys are in in 50+ languages. How can we translate the data so that it can be used for aggregate (worldwide) performance indicator dashboards in PowerBI? We are developing a user interface (UI) that will enable project staff to clean their Kobo data and submit it to the Data Lake. This translation could be embedded in the UI or done as part of the submission process from the UI to the Data Lake.

Skills: Data, KI/translation, data dashboards, development

We invite anyone interested in contributing to improving digitalization in the social sector and making sure it is equitable, and fair. 

This includes not just people from the tech sector but also those from social work, research, and anyone else interested.

At the event we will solve specific digitalization (software, data, etc.) problems brought to us by the social sector with the goal of generating a proto-type or starting point for the organisation. 

Equally important as the actual work is the interaction. The event will bring different people together and hopefully offer an opportunity to creatively think about the current digitalization challenges in the social sector and to have fun doing so.

A "Certificate of Attendance" will be issued upon request.