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The audience of the hackathon kick-off event included the teams enrolled in the contest, experts and mentors, representatives of the Independent Journalism Center, DW Akademie and Internews.
Nadine Gogu, director of the Independent Journalism Center, said that the media hackathon has already become a tradition. She declared that its essence is to bring together different people – journalists, IT developers, bloggers, representatives of civil society – in order to create beautiful things together. ‘This IJC event is a good opportunity for people interested in innovation to generate ideas that would help us have a better information environment. We encourage you to make the most of the mentors' experience, so that we would have 12 very good project ideas on Sunday. I hope that the jury will have a hard job selecting the best projects’, Nadine Gogu said.
One of the mentors of this year's hackathon, Viorica Zaharia, chairperson of the Press Council, pointed out that lately the media space of the Republic of Moldova was invaded by fake news, specifying that the forms of manipulation and propaganda have become more and more varied and dangerous. ‘Unfortunately, we have a lot of informational garbage, therefore it is our duty to help the media consumers to distinguish truth from manipulation and to become more vigilant. I am convinced that at the end of the hackathon we will go home with ideas and solutions that will help cleansing the information environment, thus helping media consumers to have a better media literacy’, said Viorica Zaharia.
The 12 competing teams are: PythonPlato, JavaKierkegaard, Veernews, Youth Media Centre, Social media, Elerix, MOMO, Spherlab, HighFive, DotPy, Hype Mode Media, InstaNews Builders.
The topic of this year's hackathon is media literacy, so the participants have the mission to develop web or mobile applications as well as other IT tools to help media consumers develop their critical thinking, filter information and detect manipulation easier.
In this respect, the participants will benefit from the advice and expertise of local and international mentors. The team of Moldovan mentors is represented by: Ruslan Mihalevschi, editor-in-chief of the independent regional publication ‘SP’ in Balti; Viorica Zaharia, chairperson of the Press Council; Sorina Stefirta, director of the School of Advanced Journalism; Dona Scola, co-founder of the Generator Hub and of the DNT Association; Victor Spanu, co-founder of the Pandametrix and Anabot startups, winner of two previous hackathons; Gheorghe Pisarenco, web developer.
The foreign experts come from Germany – Daniel Seitz, media professor; Olga Kisselmann, manager for innovation in Deutsche Welle’s Research and Cooperation Group; Marcus Bösch, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur and co-founder of ‘Vragments’ VR studio; Charlotte Krickel, media literacy expert. The mentors are going to make a number of presentations on media literacy, thus helping the teams to develop new applications that will encourage media consumers to get informed consciously and to avoid manipulation.
At the end of the three days of contest, a professional jury will designate the winning teams. This year, depending on the complexity of the proposed projects, two categories of awards will be offered: 2 grants of 4,000 US dollars each and 3 grants of 3000 euros each.
The fourth edition of the Fifth Power Media Hackathon is organised by the Independent Journalism Center under ‘Strengthening Freedom of Opinion in the Republic of Moldova’ Project, supported by the Deutsche Welle Akademie and funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany, and ‘Media Enabling Democracy, Inclusion and Accountability in Moldova (MEDIA-M)’ Project, funded by USAID and implemented by Internews.
