Another milestone has been achieved – the creation of Social Hackademy Online Platform! This one signalling the end of the preparatory part of our endeavour and the beginning of piloting part. The aim of the platform is to be an online hub for learners, trainers, organizers, CSOs and other interested parties to facilitate the learning, communication, sharing, organization and implementation of Hackathons, involvement of local community and presentation area of achievements.

The online platform serves multiple purposes:

1. It is an online learning platform that hosts the repository of open educational resources (OERs) and other learning materials used in the Social Hackademy Training Courses and hackathon implementation.

2. Supports the organisation of the Social Hackathons by enabling local NGOs and social enterprises to collaborate with trainers and hackathon organizers in developing tasks and challenges that the training participants work on during the training. This provides opportunities for learners to create digital contents that addresses real needs and supportNGOs with contributing to their digital products.

3. It is the online space for organising Hackathons and hackathon challenges – the place where information about the Hackathon is communicated with other parties and public, where hackers can apply to participate in Hackathon, where different challenges and ideas for solutions can be proposed and the results showcased.

Another important aspect of the platform is to provide the space for communication and sharing between trainers, learners, NGOs and social enterprises. To do this it was important to make the platform user friendly and native to younger generations, so the platform was created with social media features in mind such as post walls, groups, instant messages, friends, likes, comments and other features which are used on social media widely. Another important way of communication and sharing is the forum which enables all users to communicate and access content in a structured way.

Users on the platform can also use it to present themselves and their work. The learners and hackers can showcase their skills and portfolio while the organizations can present their work and get in touch with hackers. The idea behind this is to create opportunities for learners to get experience on real-world experience and to get hired to do projects while simultaneously enable the organizations to get digital solutions for affordable price or free.

The platform is now going into the period of user testing in order to see how it can best serve to help the organization and implementation of trainings, hackathons and all of the features mentioned above during their piloting. After this, it will be enhanced based on the gathered feedback from all parties involved.

We believe that the platform, after it will be tested, evaluated and enhanced during the #hackAD piloting phase, will serve as a place where different stakeholders can participate to foster learning, creation, communication, organization of hackathons and trainings as well as joining of efforts to contribute to achieving to UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Author: Ivan Mušanović, Center of Technical Culture Rijeka