Romanian Government opens IT gates to high school students in weekend Hackatron

A group of 28 high school students will develop several online applications for the Romanian Government in a so called Hackatron which will take place next weekend (February 23-24) at the Victoria Palace. The high-schoolers will develop five websites: buget.gov.ro, which will include data about the state budget shown in a simple visual way, angajati.gov.ro, with data about the employees in public administration, posturi.gov.ro, with data about vacancies in public administration, petitii.gov.ro with online petitions from citizens and data.gov.ro, which facilitates access to all data on the previous four platforms. BitDefender and Microsoft are partners in this project. The high school students who will attend this first edition of the event organized by the Government were chosen from among the top performers and IT competitions by the Education Ministry. It is not the first time the Government externalizes an IT project and brings in young blood. In December this year, Prime Minister Victor Ponta recruited Cristian Botan (in picture), a 25-year old who had developed an online platform aiming to bring more transparency into the state hiring process. The platform developed by Cristian Botan features job announcements from all state institutions, as published in the Romanian Official Journal. Botan is now the PM's adviser and has already proposed that all public institutions be obliged to publish their vacancies on the website. “Not only did Cristian Botan draw our attention to one of sorest points of the system, but he also devised a solution to cure it: an online platform that brings transparency to the system,” wrote Prime Minister Ponta on his blog. “I personally intended for this announcement to reach the online world because that’s where Cristian comes from and that’s the world to which he speaks. I wanted to reach the young, those who, just like Cristian, want to make a change to the current state of the Romanian system,” added PM Ponta. editor@romania-insider.com (photo source: gov.ro)