Worldbank article
Registration closed on 21 December 2022.
WHAT A HACKATHON IS: A hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 hours or more. During the hackathon, you will work together with your team to ulitise different expertise and skills in building a Minimal Viable Product.
The hackathon was in the form of a three-day (72 hours) design thinking event where multidisciplinary teams will analyze the problem, generate ideas, and propose some concrete technological solutions to set up digital signature infrastructure for the IFMIS in Lesotho.
Proposed IT solutions were expected to be presented in the form of a prototype. The hackathon’s working sessions were conducted by professional facilitators with experience in public sector digital innovations.
NB: An applicant would apply as an individual and be match-made with other participants.
Team TechGang 2.0 created a web-based solution that compliments the NID data by enrolling users' biometric data in a secondary database. The stored biometric data as well as a one-time password is used to authenticate the identity of the user prior to the approval of the transaction.
The main objective is to design a practical and innovative potential digital technology solution in a hackathon to authenticate transactions and documents in the IFMIS by the users. Additionally, this potential digital solution could be used across the public sector for transaction processing.
The main benefits of the digital signature infrastructure will be:
Automating the PFM processes by doing away with the paper-based processing of transactions in the system, therefore improving efficiency and effectiveness of PFM processes.
Strengthening of the internal controls and preventing further accumulation of expenditure arrears by improving the coverage of commitment controls and e-Payments.
Stronger controls over payment processing and less chances of payment frauds.
Strengthen the efficiency of the treasury systems by decreasing the financial cost associated with the manual processing of transactions.
Where are some resources to help you formulate your proposal
Worldbank article
Example
Enlightenment
Understanding
Here is what you need to know about the hackathon
The composition of teams should reflect the following expertise profiles (within the 5 members - team may include other skills too):
The role of the cryptographic expert will be to create a private and public key
pair for implementing digital signatures using the existing digital identity infrastructure in Lesotho.
A solution to store and manage these keys through a centralized app will be critical to the prototype
developed during the hackathon.
The architect's role will be to develop a scalable application architecture and
technology stack of the prototype. If the prototype developed using the hackathon is successful, it is
expected to provide services to almost all public sector employees.
This role will be crucial in designing
an application that could digitally sign transactions as well as the documents in the IT systems of the
Government. The system architect will document the system architecture and guide the programmers
during the hackathon to follow secure coding practices.
The software programmers will code the prototype. The programming skillsets
will depend upon the system architecture and technology stack developed by the team at the proposal
stage. One programmer should specialize in writing APIs.
The specialist will be responsible for designing
and coding APIs to access the digital identity related infrastructure and provide services to the MoF
applications to create digital signatures.