9 The Technopreneurship Centre won a total of 12 hackathons in 2022! The Technopreneurship Centre (TPC) attended and participated in a total of 15 hackathons, and won at 12 of them (two international and 10 national) in 2022. Read all about their victorious and inspiring spree throughout this second semester below: Security summit hackathon In June 2022, TPC students participated in a two-day hackathon focusing on developing solutions to protect South African citizens from malicious identity theft. This hackathon is hosted annually by ITWeb in collaboration with Geekulcha, and is sponsored by the tech firms Snode Technologies and Telspace Africa, and by the Northern Cape Department of Economic Development and Tourism, among others. This year’s event aimed to help young talent to sharpen their cybersecurity skills and to provide participants with opportunities to enter the job market. The event saw more than 60 hackers − made up of tertiary students, cyber security enthusiasts, and young professionals – competing to identify vulnerabilities and create applications and solutions to protect digital citizens and firms from cyber threats. The UJ TPC team ‘SecureIT’ (Lerato Tlhako and Angelic Mokoena) were the second-place winners, scooping up a R10 000 cash prize. They developed a web application that uses artificial intelligence to generate passwords for users' accounts across different online platforms. The duo were also named ‘best female hackers’, and received an internship opportunity with Snode Technologies. HackCorruption – TPC team emerge victorious at an international hackathon Accountability Lab (AL) and the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) hosted 100 virtual and in-person participants for the innovative Tech4Good event between 22 and 24 July 2022. HackCorruption is a people-powered hackathon to unearth anti-corruption solutions. The judging panel declared five teams to be the overall winners with solutions that addressed a lack of transparency in public procurement processes and established creative whistleblowing platforms and open data dashboards. Among the five teams, the TPC team ‘Tech Stars’ (Lerato Tlhako, Lethabo Makopo, and Angelic Mokoena) were named one of the victorious teams. Tech Stars created a smart dashboard that allows citizens to monitor local budget allocations, tender awards, and implementation progress, along with a whistleblowing function to report allegations of wastage and fraud. The winning teams are now eligible for financial support of up to $10,000 to build prototypes of their ideas at a bootcamp for a period of three months. Participants were drawn from South Africa, Lesotho, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, and Kenya, with more than 40% of them being women. The hackathon was supported by the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) at the US Department of State, through the AntiCorruption Solutions Through Emerging Technologies (ASET) programme. ASET advances the US’s strategy on countering corruption, and the hackathon took place in conjunction with the Summit for Democracy Year of Action. SATNACCyberHack – New TPC startup to be incubated by Telkom Telkom FutureMakers hosted ICT university students who took part in Telkom’s SATNAC Cyber Security Hackathon on 19-21 August 2022. This hackathon was held on the theme of “Fraud management: Innovating against digital identity theft, business e-mail compromise and insider threat in a cloud-based world”, and aimed to counter the rise of fraud across all business sectors, including SIM-swap fraud and business e-mail compromise. Left to right: Mmathebe Zvobwo, Managing Executive for enterprise and supplier development, Lethabo Makopo, Lerato Tlhako, and Angelic Mokoena (TPC students), and Nontobeko Gumede, broadcast journalist and TV presenter.
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