Department of Information and Tourism, Taipei City Government

The Taipei City Department of Information Technology (DoIT) held the “2024 Taipei Spring Codefest - City Dashboard Hackathon” award ceremony and results presentation on July 2. Mayor Chiang Wan-an attended the event to encourage the participants who stood out in the 30-hour-long programming competition.

After the impressive dashboard presentations by the teams, Mayor Chiang expressed his gratitude to the participants and encouraged the teams: “From disaster prevention to climate change issues, each dashboard component provides crucial information to citizens. Not only does it bridge the gap between the government and the public, but it also demonstrates that Taipei has world-class talent. These achievements will extend beyond City Hall and, starting with district offices, gradually integrate into the daily life of residents.”

During the hackathon, to make the results more relevant to the public, DoIT invited the departments of civil affairs, transportation, fire, environmental protection, and urban development to provide professional insights based on their respective expertise as scenario challenges for the teams. The winners included students from the National Taiwan University Department of Electrical Engineering and Chung Yuan Christian University Department of Information Management, as well as teams from private companies such as Vpon Big Data Group, Hon Hai Technology Group, as well as contenders from the Taipei Veterans General Hospital. Each team was able to showcase their respective advanced technical skills and practical innovations. The project entries spanned important topics like climate change and net-zero emissions; real-time road control information and traffic imagery, and even predicting trends and issuing warnings based on gastroenteritis outpatient data – all designed to assist people in their day-to-day life.

Commissioner Chao Shih-Lung of DoIT made the following remarks: "As the first government agency to embrace open-source, the Taipei City Government aims to enhance service quality and efficiency through innovation. The Taipei Codefest serves as a platform for this purpose. In addition to the spring hackathon, we will host another hackathon in the fall highlighting the theme “City Microservices” to continue this tradition. By disseminating data application techniques under the open-source framework, we hope to attract passionate programming talents who share the same vision of serving the public. Together, we can create high-quality digital public services and set an example of collaboration between the public and private sectors. In the second half of the year, DoIT will redouble its efforts on open-sourcing TaipeiPASS and expanding the scope of open-source resources. We look forward to more people participating and become a part of Taipei’s progress."