Seven teams yesterday took up the challenge to go head-to-head in this year’s Hackathon, beginning two full days of coding to develop an application to manage tax collection for local authorities.
Participants of this year’s Hackathon, an application development competition, have been challenged to build an application that can be used by Municipalities and Neighbourhood Democratic Councils (NDCs) to manage tax collection and incident reporting from citizens.
Its second year running, the Hackathon is being hosted at the Grand Savannah Suite of the Pegasus Hotel by the Ministry of Public Telecommunications under the theme, “Hack to the Future.”
The competition runs throughout the weekend and challenges seven teams to 48-hours of non-stop coding to create a web and mobile-compatible application that will support a record keeping system for property owners.
According to Ministerial Advisor Lance Hinds, said system should allow categorisation of the property owners, facilitate payments online or in-office, send reminders and notices to property owners, and provide payment histories.
The application must also be able to allow citizens to make reports of issues affecting them, offer discounts, provide public data on payments and generate tax income reports.
According to Hinds, the winner of the competition will be awarded $300,000, while the second and third place winners will receive $200,000 and $100,000, respectively.
He also stated that the ministry will be working with the winning team to have the application developed and implemented at the levels of the NDCs and municipalities.
