The Executive Yuan's Office of Science and Technology (OST) announced the results of the international portion of the 2019 Presidential Hackathon, which ran for three days beginning on July 18. After careful evaluation, two teams emerged victorious from a field of strong competitors: Malaysia's Mentadak and CoST from Honduras. This year's event was the first to involve international participants, according to the OST, and drew 23 eager teams from a total of 13 countries.
Malaysia's Mentadak used the Open Contracting Data Standard, said the OST, to identify conflicts of interests throughout the purchasing process. The hope is that their work can help cut corruption in the Malaysian government's ePerolehan electronic procurement system and assist honest players bidding for public construction projects.
The project from CoST, a team from Taiwan's diplomatic ally Honduras, sought to address the conflicts between national economic development and land use. Making use of public information and procurement websites, CoST was able to inject greater transparency into environmental impact assessments, optimize the distribution of land resources, and increase the public's acceptance of public construction.
The OST also said that the domestic side of the Presidential Hackathon was about to move into the final competition stage. The theme for this year's domestic competitors is "building a smart nation," with the core spirit of not only making Taiwan a leading nation in open information, but even more importantly turning the country into a global leader in the application of data and information resources.