Winners of the First Tourism Hackathon in Moscow Announced

Moscow hosted the final of the world’s first hackathon on the digitalization of the tourism industry, the ‘Moscow Travel Hack’. Several teams competed against one another to solve a task set by Russian and international partners, inspired by the everyday challenges they face as a company. Final projects were presented to a jury on 9^th February, to select the winning team, who shared a cash prize of 1.1 million rubles.

Moscow Travel Hack, the first hackathon devoted to digitalizing the tourism sector was organized by Moscow’s Tourism Committee together with 10 Russian and international partners, including Facebook, Amazon Web Services, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and Discover.Moscow portal.

“Tourism is one of the industries where technical solutions must be not only effective, but also convenient from the point of view of the end user. Moreover, developers need to remember that tourists from all over the world will use their application or service - and for each of them the product should be simple and clear. This is an important factor that experts paid attention to when determining the winners of the hackathon,” said Eduard Lysenko, head of the Department of Information Technology.

One of the partners – the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts – was inviting the participants to come up with a software solution for a virtual voice guide to the museum, while another - Facebook – was looking for a solution to improve the process of planning or seeking travel options.

On the hackathon were presented such solutions as individual touristic activities planning, automatic processing of the pictures, automatization of the tickets buying.

Hackathons help to find new ideas and ways of developing specific areas of business. Teams with readymade projects in the relevant areas offered their solutions to the partners and presented them separately at the hackathon. As a result, Moscow’s tourism portal Discover.Moscow wants to create an online service for communication between tourists coming to Moscow and residents of the city.

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The Department of Information Technologies of Moscow (DIT) has been rapidly developing and actively growing for the past 5 years. During these years we have created over a thousand systems and services and we are pursuing the target of launching around 300 new projects annually. Today, we are proud of having digitalized over 166 state services, this is obviously more than any other region of Russia. Moreover, within the last years we have created an outstanding number of 178 portals, including the official Mayor

and Government of Moscow web-site "mos.ru". Our systems cover over 60 industries and penetrate into each aspect of

Moscow citizens' everyday lives, our products and services include:

•          Electronic queue for Civil registry office;

•          Arrangement of remote medical appointments;

•          Personal electronic medical records;

•          Children assignment to kindergardens/schools/extracurricular activities;

•          Providing schools with cutting edge technological equipment;

•          Obtaining references, enquiries and services remotely;

•          Numerous projects in housing and public amenities, starting from telemetrics and

•          Energetics to the possibility of submitting water usage information.

Current structure of the Department distinguishes up to 30 unique products and programs, including medical and education systems informatization, creation of crowdsourcing platforms, development of various resources and portals for Moscow and its citizens. We are aimed at continuing the process of effective informatization of the city with an emphasis on innovation development and advanced technologies application.