Minister Ayanda Dlodlo hacks Public Service Month
The University of Johannesburg was turned into a festival of ideas when the Minister for the Public Service and Administration Ms Ayanda Dlodlo convened over 400 of the brightest and most innovative minds in South Africa for a three-day National Public Service Hackathon. The event was a business-unusual closing ceremony to mark the end of the annual Public Service Month Campaign, which was a hive of productive activity, demonstrating that government was indeed at work.
Minister Dlodlo officially opened the Hackathon by learning how to code the welcoming message using C-Sharp computer programming language and she also joined the Hackers for the pitches that took place at midnight on Saturday.
Also present at the Hackathon were Deputy Minister for the Public Service and Administration Dr Chana Pilane-Majake, Deputy Minister of Communications Ms. Pinky Kekana, as well as Gauteng MEC for Education Mr Panyaza Lesufi.
The 400 plus participants hailed from all over the country from different backgrounds. Upon arrival at the Hackathon, they were briefed on some of the biggest challenges facing service delivery in the country. The Hackers were given 40 hours to develop innovative solutions to challenges in the Education, Health, Environment, and Accountability sectors, amongst others.
The overall winners were Team Guardian who created a solution called Keaphila, a decentralised data storage system based on Blockchain principles, which will enhance the implementation of the NHI Scheme. The solution allows medical professional across the board to access a patient’s file remotely.
The runners-up were University of Johannesburg’s TechnoLab team who developed BETA which focuses on empowering young people in South Africa to be able to attain extremely critical and useful skills. They created an app that uses artificial intelligence to help learners solve Mathematics problems intuitively and easily.
Data Wizzards completed the top three and they came up with a solution to digitise the public health system in order to leverage big data and deep learning to deliver enhanced services to citizens.
Minister Dlodlo confirmed that all the solutions that were developed over the weekend will be presented to the relevant government departments to encourage them to implement the solutions they deem most viable.
She says that Public Sector innovation is the new frontier in the march to development and the Ministry for the Public Service and Administration is committed to becoming a vehicle for innovation in the Public Service.
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