Hackathons as a Public-Private Collaboration Platform

Abstract:

The article is an analysis of hackathons as a new trend in the field of cooperation between public authorities and private entities. These are events initiated by the government to solve significant problems for society. As statistics show, hackathons are a rather unpopular instrument for implementing public policy. The purpose of the paper is to identify the mechanism of creating new public solutions through public-private partnership in the form of hackathons. The growing role of ICT in social and economic life creates new opportunities to use open data and applications to solve social problems. New ideas and solutions created during civic hackathons are not the only benefits of this form of cooperation between government and non-governmental actors. Other benefits include increasing the transparency of public activities, improving the democratisation of the government as well as meeting social needs more accurately and building trust between partners.