14/10/2015

The end of the ENABLE Hackathon was celebrated with a central Europe Code Week 2015 event that took place at the Facebook London office on 13 October.

The six winning teams coming from different corners of the world gathered together, face-to-face and virtually, in order to meet with an audience of around 80 young people, parents, educators, industry representatives, children's rights advocates, decision makers, experts and charities. The winners, Denmark (Behaviour Tweaker), Germany (Cyberbullying First Aid App), The Netherlands (Peer Project), Costa Rica (Treelp), Egypt (S!BB) and Ukraine (Polite Internet User) presented their creative solutions and received recognition for their work.

Janice Richardson, coordinator of ENABLE and member of Facebook’s Safety Advisory Board, organised the event and noted that the Hackathon would not have been possible without the support of ENABLE partners such as Facebook, Vodafone, Twitter, Ask.fm and Kaspersky Lab. Other partners such as Microsoft, Google, Disney, Icelandic Red Cross, and Pixel Creative Technologies were also very generous and supported the project by sourcing gifts of appreciation for the youth.

The event also highlighted the release of the ENABLE research report which underlines the importance of 3 lessons learned from the Hackathon: 1) young people need support in understanding the importance of empathy; 2) they focus on victims and bystanders but not on those who are doing the bullying; 3) parents are rarely part of the solutions they propose.

The ENABLE Hackathon was launched in June with the aim of facilitating a conversation about bullying with young people, helping them understand the dynamics behind bullying and guiding them as they work in teams to come up with creative solutions to deal with this problem.

The project attracted more than 100 participants aged between 9 and 17 from Germany, UK, Croatia, Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Scotland, Egypt, France, US, Nigeria, Ukraine, Italy, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Denmark, Finland and Costa Rica. As a result, ENABLE received more than 30 submissions of anti-bullying tools and testimonials.

ENABLE strives to contribute to the wellbeing of all young people, both online and offline. The project is supported by associate partners from industry and guided by an advisory board of 12 international experts.