Media innovation was the focus of three hackathons in Tunis, Casablanca and Algiers

In the course of these hackathons, nine projects, presented by teams made up of journalists, web developers and graphic and other designers, were showcased within three co-working spaces: Cogite in Tunis, Newworklab in Casablanca and Maghreb émergent in Algiers.

Two stand-out participants, Malek Khadhraoui and Julien Le Bot, both web journalists, offered support to the teams in their definition and creation of the product or service, with support from local mentors (entrepreneurs, journalists, developers, designers, and so on).

Each team leader gave a three-minute overview of their project and in return their mentors provided feedback to help them consolidate their prototype.

After the last presentation, the winners of each creative marathon were chosen on the basis of the following six criteria:
- Usefulness: is the product/service genuinely useful?
- Design: is the product/service easy and agreeable to use?
- Originality: is the product/service unique and/or innovative?
- Quality: does the product/service enhance the quality of information available for the target public?
- Feasibility: is there a strong probability that the product/service will be developed?
- Presentation: has the project been presented convincingly?

The nine projects for the three competition hackathons

Tunis hackathon

- The " Dalanda" project won first prize. It relates to a mobile app offering a daily edition on local news in Tunisia.
- There was a special mention for the " ArchiTap" project, which is a scheme to develop services based on the digitised archives of TAP, the Tunisian Press Agency.
- " Thabatly" intends to develop a "rumour buster" platform to combat the spread of disinformation on Facebook.

Casablanca hackathon

- " Miss my prof" is the winning project, the aim of which is to combat teacher absenteeism through the collection of data. The ultimate objective is to create activist media addressing this issue.
- A special mention for the " CeQuilsOntPromis.ma" project, which allows monitoring of the words and actions of Morocco's political parties and politicians by creating a database to be used by researchers and journalists to follow the evolution of promises kept.
- " Wink" proposes centralising local news produced by an association of correspondent journalists based in Agadir.
- " MediaPlay", a musical discussion medium, aims to encourage young Moroccan artistes.

Algiers hackathon

- The winner is " Qrib Likoum", a citizens' service platform allowing better forwarding of local news to local administrators who can then mobilise with a view to addressing and solving problems.
- " Elbeb.info" proposes gathering local information and making it available to the media, helping them to decide how to process it.

Representatives from the winning projects will meet again in Tunis on 5 and 6 December 2015 on the occasion of a 4M Forum. If they wish, they can also submit their projects for the contest organised by Code for Africa within the context of Afrique innovation.

Afrique Innovation, a project by:

In partnership with: