calling all e-⁠residents! join the global hack to help fight covid-19

Hannah Brown • Apr 09, 2020 • 5 min read

E-⁠Residency partners with the world’s biggest online hackathon to help solve the most difficult challenges of our time

ATTENTION e-⁠residents and all other changemakers!

STEP RIGHT UP designers, developers, scientists, engineers, marketers, and activists!

E-⁠RESIDENCY IS PARTNERING WITH THE GLOBAL HACK this weekend and we encourage all the brilliant minds in our community to join us in the most important hackathon of our lives!

The Global Hack aims to share and develop technological solutions to the current COVID-19 crisis, and to build resilience post-pandemic.

The Global Hack

We organize events where you can learn, work with industry-leading mentors, grow and get empowered!

Tens of thousands of hackers, mentors, judges, inspirational leads, and community volunteers have answered a call to action from Estonian President, Kersti Kaljulaid, who gave a strong rallying call to the international community to find solutions via hackathon.

The Global Hack is the brainchild of Garage 48 and Accelerate Estonia, and is co-hosted and supported by a raft of other organisations and government bodies in the startup community in Estonia, the EU, and beyond. It’s the culmination of Hack the Crisis and 40 other hackathons that the pioneering Estonian version has given rise to around the world, including in Sweden, India, and Madagascar.

Some of the solutions developed at these hackathons are even in use in the fight against COVID-19, including Suve, the COVID-19 answerbot already working hard on Estonian Government websites.

Prototypes developed during the Global Hack have the potential to gain funding through investors and mentors from business, government, science, academia, civil society, media, and the arts. The confirmed prize pool is €120,000 (and growing), including €75,000 from the European Commission.

How e-⁠Residency is contributing

E-⁠Residency is really proud to be part of this incredible initiative to empower businesses not only to survive this crisis, but also thrive long after it is over. Some of our team members will be mentoring teams taking part in the hackathon. Further, as well as contributing to the major prize pool, e-⁠Residency is also offering the opportunity for winning teams of the tracks to receive a great prize package to help turn their prototypes into real working global businesses.

For these lucky teams, we’re offering to cover the cost of applying for e-⁠Residency for one founder, the cost of registering one private limited company in Estonia, a business consulting session, and a year’s worth of virtual office services for the company. The e-⁠Residency team will also provide one-to-one guidance over the entire process.

E-residency can transform prototypes into global businesses through secure digital access to e-Estonia.

Challenging the ‘new normal’ way of working

The Global Hack is organised via a series of ‘tracks’, which highlight the most pressing challenges we are facing, such as health, governance, the environment, crisis response, work, the economy, and mental health.

Read more about the tracks on The Global Hack website.

E-⁠Residency is partnering with the Global Hack to sponsor the ‘work’ track, which is focused on the new normal way of working, hastened by the social distancing policies governments have put in place to tackle the spread of the virus. Leader of the work track is Garry Kasparov, former World Chess Champion, Avast Security Ambassador, and Author of Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins.

It’s really a no-brainer that e-Residency is supporting the work track. Our own story perfectly illustrates that outside-the-box thinking can solve big problems.

E-Residency itself was a solution hacked by a few enterprising Estonians to implement a crazy idea to open Estonia up and allow just about anyone in the world access to its advanced digital society. And now 5 years later, that crazy idea has brought to the country valuable financial and cultural benefits, and most significantly a global community of highly skilled and enterprising e-⁠residents.

Remote-working e-⁠resident entrepreneurs are equipped with a full set of digital business tools and services that they can access online from anywhere in the world. Now, they’re well prepared to continue doing so from home, safe in the knowledge that their businesses are digitally resilient. The e-⁠Residency team and our e-⁠residents are therefore well-equipped with a wealth of disruptive ideas to challenge the future of work and hack solutions this weekend.

Estonian by birth and global in its existence, e-⁠Residency embodies the spirit of this great initiative to bring the world’s best and brightest together to collaborate and solve the big challenges we face right now. It may be a long time until the world is out of the COVID-19 woods, but we’re committed to support all members of our community and beyond for the long road of challenges ahead.

Last chance!

One final call for our e-⁠residents and other changemakers to join the Global Hack and to collaborate and build real working solutions to fight the COVID-19 crisis.

Take inspiration from the story of Estonia and e-⁠Residency: no matter how big the idea or how difficult the challenge, we can solve anything together.