HackCorruption Colombia has a dynamic list of winners after our first regional hackathon in Latin America. The winning ideas range from digital procurement dashboards to whistleblowing platforms and open data portals. The event wrapped in Bogotá, Colombia, with 20 teams taking to the pitch stage and nine winning teams announced.

Accountability Lab hosted the third HackCorruption event in Colombia, following the first event in South Africa and the second in Nepal. The program supports talented individuals from the civic tech, CSO, and activist arenas to build innovative solutions to combat corruption. The hackathon is supported by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement at the U.S. Department of State and the USAID Countering Transnational Corruption Grand Challenge for Development, in partnership with the Center for International Private Enterprise and Development Gateway. Our Latin American regional hackathon invited 75 changemakers from Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic to work together.

There are three problem sets that the hackathon covered: (1) Budget and Ownership Transparency; (2) Open Contracting & Transparency of Public Procurement; and (3) Digital Citizenship to Constrain Corruption. Additionally, teams were encouraged to work on transnational corruption under the three problem sets. This involves global networks and strips countries of their wealth in a massive transfer of resources from developing to developed countries.

Our winning teams will receive additional financial support of up to $10,000, mentorship, and ongoing training to help them build out their ideas. See their ideas below.

1. Caja Pública: A web application that allows users to access information about beneficial owners or state contracting at the local and national level in Colombia.

Members: 

• Karen Andrea Aparicio Mora
• Esteban Felipe Caceres Gelvez

2. Spaces: A solution for citizens to collectively take care of municipal-owned property.  It is a technological solution that displays cartographic data in a user-friendly fashion in order to locate and size the municipal-owned patrimony.

Members: 

• María Elena Valencia González
• Cynthia Dehesa Guzmán
• José Rodrigo Treviño Frenk

3. MarIA: Imagine having a trustworthy companion that empowers you to report and prevent bribery involving officials securely and anonymously. With MarIA, you can effortlessly share incidents, providing crucial information to combat corruption. Our cutting-edge AI technology ensures your privacy, safeguarding your identity while delivering impactful reports.

Members:

• Rodrigo Francisco Nuñez Cárdenas
• Grissel Rodríguez Roldan
• Daniel Bustamante Lagart
• Claudia Paulina Huerta De La Garza

4. AquaCitizen: Education, technology, and open government principles for the collective protection of the water sources. AquaCitizen is a smart, decentralized community model for water quality monitoring, to enable better decision-making at community, private, and public levels. Its scope encompasses both local scenarios and hydrological basins that cross national boundaries. 

Members:

• Juan Alejandro García Rodríguez
• Juan Felipe Pinto Castelblanco
• Nicolás Calvo Tovar
• Jhonatan Mauricio Quiñones Montiel

5. Stalker de la contratación: An AI chatbot for procurement transparency. The application uses chatboxes and large language models to effectively reduce barriers for users seeking access to open contracting data. 

Members:

• Juan Pablo Marin Diaz
• David Daza
• Juliana Galvis
• Edda Forero
• Laura Celis

6. Pic Data: This web app detects fake medication boxes. The main objective is to contribute to transparency between the public and private sectors. Since pharmaceutical crime is a major global public health issue, the application is designed to be used by small pharmacies, public sector stockists, and the general public.

Members:

• Julián Eduardo Jimenez Chávez
• Jorge Alain Garcia Chávero
• Karol Rocio Aguilar Badillo
• Perla Del Carmen Garcia Loaeza

7. Ojo a las sanciones +integridad: An open data mechanism to prevent contracts with potentially corrupt companies by creating a unified national and international database (including sources such as OFAC and IADB) of sanctioned and suspended actors and relevant tax records. 

Members:

• Daniel Alejandro Valdés Amaro

8. Contractor: This solution seeks to increase transparency in the public procurement processes of Paraguay’s central and local government by providing timely information to micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), through a predictive natural language processing model using the fine-tuning of a BERT multilanguage transformer, based on historical values of similar tenders, helping bidders to participate more efficiently in tenders and identifying potential irregularities in the processes in which they participate in order to file more effective complaints.

Members:

• Cristian Sosa
• Daniel Duque
• Daniel Rojas
• Yefry Nuñez
• Dayanni Olivo

9. I-KEEP: Integrated Knowledge for Ensuring Ethical Procurement is a one-stop shop for decoding corruption data in public procurement. The platform is designed for citizens, journalists, researchers, and government decision-makers interested in analyzing information at a national and transnational level for signs of potential corruption and leveraging this analysis for subsequent actions. It is based on a collaborative web-based knowledge graph and an open platform based on open data, bridging data and information silos.

Members:

• Juan Pane
• Beatriz Vierci
• Rodrigo Villalba
• Karen Riveros

These winning teams will also participate in a 3-day intensive in-person boot camp in Colombia in October. Keep an eye on our channels for more updates!

Sheena Adams