 My name is Daniela Villa Antonio. I am the team leader for digital agriculture and today's host. Today's special guest in is Nargiza corn. Oh, yeah, Eva. Project support specialist with the Uzbekistan country office, and she will tell us about how to have a hackathon as she recently organized the agriculture hackathon digital Uzbekistan, a competition for young innovators. Hi, Nargiza. Welcome. And thanks for joining us. Hi, colleagues. Hi, Daniela. Thank you for hosting the AgriTech talks and of course having me today. My name is Nargiza Hajjayeva, and I am from Efeel Uzbekistan. Nice seeing you all today. Thanks to you, Nargiza, for joining us today. As usual, I have four questions for you. And now we will launch the timer for 12 minutes as we need to get these questions answered for the timer ends. And in the last minutes, we will take a few questions from the audience. So to all participants, please write down your questions and comments in the chat and my colleague Veronica will monitor it. So, Nargiza, our timer will start running now. Are you ready? Let's do it. Okay, let's start. So, Nargiza, first of all, can you just tell us what is a hackathon and how the idea of organizing this AgriHack came to life? Okay, so a hackathon is an event usually hosted by a company or an organization, and it brings together programmers, IT enthusiasts together for a short time to collaborate on a project and to try to come up with a solution to a problem. And let me give you a short overview of the project that has hosted the hackathon in Uzbekistan. The project is called the peace building project here between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. And it's a UN joint project between FAO and UNFBA, and it aims to have a cross-border, aims to enhance the cross-border cooperation between these two countries, and it also recognizes women and youth as peace building agents. So, one of the project activities we had was to organize an agricultural hackathon, and it would bring together youth interested in IT programmers, coders, and start-upers. The main aim was to upscale very interesting innovative solutions in agriculture, and we wanted to support these young innovators to come up with these solutions. And another interesting point to mention is that currently in Uzbekistan, in Central Asia, there is a lot of support for the agri-tech ecosystem, and there's many other incubator programs, acceleration programs, and development partners also interested in agri-tech technologies. So for now, I think it was a perfect timing to have an agri hackathon here in Uzbekistan. Well, Nargiza, I'm impressed. So it was part of a peace building project with Kyrgyzstan, if I understood well. The project itself was targeted at young innovators, and so you run this event, this hackathon together, innovative ideas to solve the problems that the border in rural communities face. And eventually it was a tool to foster community building. Wow. So I've been talking with many colleagues actually in the past months, some of them had the idea to organize a hackathon, but they were scared about the organizational effort. So I'm sure colleagues might be interested to learn this from you. How did you hack your hackathon? Yeah, that's a really good question. And here's a visual representation of the steps, main steps involved in organizing a hackathon. That's how we did it here in the country office. The first and crucial step is to define the core information about your hackathon. It is the initial planning stage, and we want to get all the details right. And this will help us also ensure that we're not missing anything. So for that, we would start by mapping out the project outcomes, putting our targets together, also having stakeholders on our information sheet, and make sure that everything aligns with the project. It's also very crucial to have all of those, all of this core information into some data sheet, because in the future they may be some partners interested in your hackathon. And maybe it's also a possibility that they would want to co-host it together so you can easily share the information about your project and your event, these partners. The second step is after we have all of the information we need, we have to consult. And it's when we approach relevant people, for example, it's our project team, we understand their needs. We look at the potential participants of the hackathon. We look at, we assess their needs. And here, since our project was a joint project between two countries, we had the amazing opportunity to consult with FEO team in Kyrgyzstan. And they had some experience with an agriculture hackathon back in the Bishkek last year. So it was great to know what their experience was so it helped us define the scope for our hackathon. The third step is having your team. First of all, you should understand which organization is responsible for what. For example, for us, it was FEO and the UNFPA, so we divided activities between us. Also, our event was co-hosted by national partners, including the Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of IT. So we had a split of responsibilities between each other. The second step is to determine who is doing what between each team inside the team. So for example, one person would be responsible for applications, the other one would be responsible for event management. The next step is the event management. And here we determine the venue, the needs of the participants. For example, if there's going to be any participants with special needs, we should always take that into account. We draft out the agenda, invite speakers. And also, one crucial point is not to forget about marketing so that people know that there is this event happening in the state. And the next step is to start the application process and manage the interview. For us, what we did, we had a Zoom call and on a rolling basis, we had people pitch their ideas for five minutes. And we had already an established criteria, which was developed by experts from the digital agriculture team. And we had those short interviews where the candidates introduced each other. And in fact, we received more than 137 applications, so it was a lot of work. And I would say the next step is to do the on-site preparations is when you go to the venue, in our case, we went there one day in advance. It's those activities that you do like reaching out to media people, setting up a banner, and making sure that everyone is on the same page, talking with your team. And the last step is the hackathon. And there you are. You are on the event. And I would say the most crucial step is to follow your agenda and make sure that everyone is informed of the agenda because it happened to us that when the teams get super excited about working together, we often forget to go on coffee breaks or have some breaks. So we always had to make sure that we're informed about the next thing that is happening. So yeah, that's all. The third is I see it takes a big effort. So basically, you launched a call for application, you review them all, and you even invited all applicants 137, oh my God, to pitch their solutions. And then you started preparing for the event itself. There was lots of communication to be done at all stages. So it was a big effort, but if I understood well through partnerships and collaborations, you were able to delegate many activities so eventually was manageable. Okay, but now tell me. So 137th applications, how many of them made it to the hackathon itself. And out of the weekend of, you know, developing their ideas with mentors, how many of them were eventually the winners who won. Yeah, I totally forgot to mention the numbers. Yeah, out of 137 applications. I think let me just pull up figures. It was 21 teams with about 70 participants. And so we had 21 ideas competing against each other. And the winners, we had four winners, and yeah, short mockups of their presentations of their idea. First one was agro data. And it's a simple and flexible comprehensive agro enterprise resource planning system. And the thing that worked out like for us was the wow factor was that this solution is trying to reduce the human factor in the process of planning and exchanging information in agriculture. And the next solution that we have chosen was is called digital agro tech. It's a monitoring system for farms and automation with AI components. And that's just their idea is briefly. The next one is called magic soft agro ecosystem. And it's an agricultural learning and community module where users can teach each other, teach each other. So the cool part that one our hearts was that farmers can take a picture for example of a spoiled tomato crop and send it on a forum to the forum and other farmers small holders or people in the neighborhood could comment and talk about it and advise what to do next. And the next solution that was chosen what is called your stars. And here it's more scientific and it is a vegetation index detection in agriculture, which is also using satellite data. And I, this solution is also very was very interesting for the government as well, because one of the stakeholders was the ministry of agriculture. Yeah, and that's all. It's so refreshing. Actually, we might run a little bit of out of time so let me remind all colleagues to post their questions in the chat but they still have one question for you I think we still have some time. This is my usual provoking question. Yes, it's so refreshing to hear of all these innovative ideas but often hackathons get criticized because what happens after the event, right. So you gather all these young innovators over a weekend, you provide them with mentorship, they are able to develop their ideas eventually you are able to award the most promising ones. And if you are not able to think of the next steps and how to support them to go from idea to a small pilot or rather proof of concept, making it a bigger pilot and eventually validated with the market and then scale up the solution. All these ideas will have the risk that they will die in very soon. So I will thought about that. That's a very interesting question and yes unfortunately there are so many factors that affect the sustainability of startups, and I were recognizing that our approach at the field was to provide a platform first of all for the youth to interact and collaborate with a common agenda to come up with an interesting solution to tackle one of the food systems challenge. And while this platform contributes to the overall objectives of a project. I would say that during the hackathon, the youth were given the opportunity to also network with mentors and have on the side consultation about their ideas about their projects about their team. And they had many opportunities to ask any of the questions they wanted whether it was technical because we had technical coding mentors, or whether it was something like if the solution fits the market because we had digital experts, digital agriculture experts and just agriculture experts that could talk to them and say it's right, wrong, and how to improve it. So, this approach would help the youth to take their idea and go further, because there's plenty of opportunities out there there are many acceleration funds, programs they can apply to. And another thing at FEO what we are trying to do is to connect them to these opportunities, because we have big network of development partners and we know of these programs. We are sending them some information about them and of course they can reach out to us and ask how they can apply or what to do to get their idea heard, because hackathon it's not always about winning it's important that we promote these types of opportunities for things and they are empowered to take the next step. Thanks, Nargiza. We really, really hope that all of these innovations will survive and will make it into available products in the markets to solve the challenges that those Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan face. I can see we are getting some questions in the chat so Veronica can you help me pick one or two. Thank you, Daniela. So, Nargiza, we have two very connected questions. So the first is whether only professional developers should be invited to hackathons or beginners can be invited as well and how to choose right participants. And the second question would be, which channels did you use to invite young innovators to work on agricultural challenges? Did you engage any community leaders to promote the hackathon? Thank you very much for the questions. So I will start with the first one, if a professional developer should be invited to hackathon only. First of all, like mentioned before, it's very important to establish some type of criteria and we had help from our digital agriculture team, we also have this digital agriculture expert national one, whose name is Murad Fasanev, yeah. So we had those consultation moments and we already had some criteria by which we wanted to select our participants. And apart from this criteria, we looked at participants as a team, not individually, because on the hackathon it's important to have a variety of people and a team can consist of, for example, a marketing specialist or a backend developer, a junior developer, a senior developer, so there can be different roles in a team. So of course, like, beginners can apply, more professional coders can apply, anyone can apply as a team and if you have the criteria, if you look at their idea, if you look at their teams, you can always decide like who to choose to participate in your hackathon. Thank you very much for that question. And the second question, just a second I'm reading it. Which channels we use to invite young innovators to work on agricultural challenges. And if we have engaged any community leaders to promote the hackathon. Okay, the channels that we use was, first of all, because we had co hosting of this event. The channel that we use was the channels of our national partners. The event, the hackathon was co financed by the Ministry of IT's regional hub in Antigone, which the project is being piloted in the area of the pilot. And they have their own channels, their own channels through which they could spread information about our hackathon. The other channels we use was through agency of youth affairs, and through our own network of development partners. And if we knew any project that was interested in hackathons or had an innovation component, we just spread a message or sent an email directly to those teams. And so that's how we got the initial, let's say, awareness raising for the hackathon and community leaders to promote the hackathon. Yes, we did. And inside our project, we often visit the pilot areas in Fergana Valley where the project is happening. And we have contacts of some community youth community leaders and we also sent them some message or an announcement that a hackathon is happening so they could apply. And these were the primary channels that we used to communicate the event that was happening. Thank you very much for these questions. They were very interesting. So thanks to you Nergisa for sharing all these experiences with us. It was really great to learn from you how you hacked your hackathon. And it was a pleasure to have you today really thank you so much.