The event brought together developers and other professionals from the EU institutions to solve challenges that are common to the three institutions, helping answer user requests, making work more efficient and improving inter-institutional collaboration and innovation. It was also the first real test for the cloud infrastructure available for the EU institutions. 

The journey to InterHack

The Saturday event was just one stop in a journey which began with ideation workshops in Brussels and Luxembourg – colleagues from the three institutions were invited to suggest ideas around Mobility, Interoperability and Security and attract peers to work on them.

23 ideas were submitted - among them A system to manage multilingualism, Working across DGs, Project repository, Tiny surveys and more.  Each project had a dedicated webpage where teams could discuss ideas and attract more participants through voting. A team was considered complete if there were at least 4 members from at least 2 institutions.

InterHack day

50 participants from the three institutions in Brussels, Luxembourg and Ireland came on the Saturday for a full day of teamwork coding and inspiration. From all the 23 ideas submitted originally, 5 were selected to be worked on. At the end of the day all teams made live demonstrations of their applications.

There were two winning teams. The jury made of representatives of the senior management of the IT departments of the organizing institutions voted for the "E-badge" idea - a mobile ID pass/badge for officials and visitors.

The second winner was chosen as favourite voted by the audience.  -"Interlink" is a “LinkedIn for institutions”, a platform with profiles of all the staff from the EU institutions, where people, their photos and job descriptions could be found easily.

What's next?

All 5 projects will be presented at the first interinstitutional IT forum, DIGITEC 2016: Digital Future, co-organised by DIGIT and DG ITEC on 29 November in Brussels.

*Hackathon – an event in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming