The European Commission and the United Nations have launched the third edition of Open Source Solutions for Sustainable Development Goals (OSS4SDG), a hackathon that brings together tech innovators to design open source solutions addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The focus of this year's edition is SDG 5, which seeks to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls with digital solutions.
OSS4SDG aims to develop and extend existing open source projects and Digital Public Goods (DPGs), offering solutions that not only help achieve the UN's SDGs but also add to the world's digital commons.
The hackathon is divided into seven challenges, many of them focusing on safety both in the virtual and physical world. To address these challenges, submissions should aim to develop an open source solution for one of the following:
- A website comment moderator—to suggest alternatives when someone is writing a comment containing gender-discriminatory or hateful language
- A gender-based violence case builder—to collect clips, recordings and other sensor data from a device
- A deepfake detector
- A collaborative walking-safety map
- An awareness builder—a tutorial, story or a game to educate on gender-based discrimination
- A protection provider—for reporting online or offline violence
- An online safety map
The six-week online event is organised by the UN’s Office of Information and Communication Technologies (OICT) and the Directorate-General for Informatics of European Commission (DG DIGIT), in collaboration with ITU EQUALS and POP. The deadline for submissions is 15 September.
The SDGs are the UN's global development objectives established in 2015, intended to be a call to action to end poverty and hunger, and to reach global sustainability, by the year 2030. They address a broad range of social, economic, and environmental challenges such as inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace, and justice.
The previous editions of the hackathon have focused on education and smart cities. The event is part of the UN's wider strategy to promote and leverage digital public goods, and open source as a part of it, for global cooperation.