Hackathon Citizens of Wallonia

Last March, I had the opportunity to participate in the latest edition of the "Citizens of Wallonia" hackathon, an event dedicated to technological innovation for the Walloon region. The hackathon started on Friday afternoon and ended on Sunday evening, bringing together technology, design, and architecture enthusiasts around ambitious projects.

Our team was composed of developers, graphic designers, and two architecture students who joined us to bring their expertise. Additionally, the hackathon assigned us a coach specializing in artificial intelligence development, whose advice was a valuable asset throughout the weekend.

Starting on Friday, we dedicated our time to an intensive brainstorming session to determine the project we would work on. After many discussions, we decided to focus on the theme of data transparency in Wallonia. Our goal was to create a chatbot capable of cross-referencing the region’s open data in order to facilitate access to information for researchers, journalists, students, and curious citizens.

Our project was to develop a chatbot trained on Wallonia’s open data. This bot was designed to answer complex questions by cross-referencing different data sources. For example, you could ask if there was a correlation between the use of public transport by families with at least one child and the number of schools in their municipality. The bot would then analyze data on family distribution, public transport usage, and the number of schools to provide a detailed response. A task that would have taken weeks for a statistician was greatly simplified by artificial intelligence.

To carry out this project, we used Microsoft Azure cloud, which allowed us to set up an intelligent API capable of sorting available data based on its relevance. This infrastructure enabled our AI to focus on the most relevant information to provide accurate and fast responses.

At the end of the hackathon, our team won the Data Prize for this project, along with a €10,000 grant to continue its development. However, after careful consideration, we decided to decline the funding, as we were not able to commit as much as this project would have required.

This experience at the "Citizens of Wallonia" hackathon was extremely rewarding. It allowed us to collaborate with professionals from various backgrounds and contribute, for the duration of a weekend, to a project aimed at improving data transparency in Wallonia.