Openhack - Coding for Humanity joins EWB-SWE´s venture
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EWB-SWE is pleased to announce the takeover of openhack to further invest in and develop socially sustainable solutions with humanitarian benefits.
Founded in 2015 as a project under Engineers Without Borders Sweden to answer pressing societal and humanitarian challenges through open source development, openhack grew into a subsidiary in the following years. In line with our digitalization strategy, EWB-SWE is now fully taking over the social company and collaborative community with one purpose: continue to solve challenges related to the Global Goals and Agenda 2030 through innovation.
- There are many good ideas, a strong will for innovation and a great entrepreneurial spirit in Sweden that we must cultivate and create conditions for. This is an important investment in our digitization strategy to be able to influence around the world. It is essential that we work together for social impact and increase collaborations in order to reach the Global Goals and create a better and more sustainable world, says Caroline Edelstam, Secretary General of EWB-SWE.
15 events and 10,000 participants
openhack is Sweden's hackathon pioneer and has won the CIO Awards as Digital Inspirer of the Year. To date, it has organized 15 successful hackathons on a physical, digital and hybrid basis in the last years, bringing together over 10,000 participants taking over 60 different humanitarian and social impact-oriented challenges.
Among these events, Hack the Crisis Sweden organized in 2020 during the pandemic broke record numbers with 7,500 people participating in the event, 160 partner organizations joining and supporting the initiative, leading to 530 solutions to different societal challenges. Just Arrived, BrightAct and VoiceMed, among others, are some of the startups that were successfully launched from the ideas.
Welcome on board openhack!
- This is the beginning of an important collaboration where we have the opportunity to influence in a larger, international context. With EWB-SWE’s national and international network and unique engineering expertise, we can broaden our operations. Openhack has a large potential and we get a greater opportunity to create humanitarian benefits through innovation and social impact together, says Lukas Scheffer Leander, co-founder and CEO of Openhack.
We look forward to taking the next step in bringing together organizations and tech-volunteers to meet and exchange ideas and knowledge to advance humanity.
For more information on the venture, you can read our press release here (in Swedish) and reach out to Caroline Edelstam, caroline.edelstam@ewb-swe.org.
For more information on openhack, visit their website.
