On November 15-17 International Data Festival (DataFest Tbilisi 2017) was held in Tbilisi Kakha Bendudkidze University Campus. The festival was backed by the Prague Civil Society Centre, UNDP Istanbul Regional Office, GITA, TBC Bank and other partners and was organized by “ForSet” and Digital Communication Network.
There were about 400 participants including journalists, civic activists, marketing specialists, data analysts, developers, designers, etc present at the festival.
On the first day, CNN representatives, representatives of the leading European online shop Zalando and other organizations discussed online data-related topics, such as: open data and their effective management, data journalism, data communication and visualization, data-based digital marketing, artificial intelligence, data safety, etc.
At the end of the festival, finalists of the Ministry of Data project demonstrated their presentations of state budget, tourism and gender issues. Ministry of Data is an international data Hackathon with the participation of teams selected from 5 countries. The teams were composed of programmers interested in data handling, journalists and designers from Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine. 3 Hackathon winner teams were revealed at the closure of the festival, and one of them is from Georgia.
One of the winners is Irakli Barbakadze, representing the team with focus on gender issues. "The team came up with an idea of creating a common online platform for female entrepreneurs, main goal of which is offering women entrepreneurs an easy way of information exchange and assistance to potential female “Start-upers” in accessing market and overcoming barriers." In his opinion, the portal is publicly-accessible, based on business registration data and provides means of effortless collection of more diverse and high-quality data. "
“Within the scope of the present event, we were given an opportunity not merely to listen to presentations of data handling “Gurus”, but also to receive practical advices on all data-related topical issues directly from them." – stated Irakli.
The festival is being conducted on annual basis and it will be likewise held in 2018.