The Marathon is the accelerator’s introductory event that was held simultaneously in three cities: St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kazan. ITMO University served as a partner for the St. Petersburg part of the Marathon. Its participants were tasked with creating scalable solutions for social services organizations..
“Our task today is to find solutions that would be help NGOs and all those who help solve social issues to do their work faster and with more efficiency,” – welcomed the participants Alexey Nitsa, project head of Rybakov Foundation’s Office of Third Sector Development.
Yuri Kuporosov of ITMO University’s Social Design and Entrepreneurship Center explained to the event’s participants the principle by which the ideas are selected.
Marathon of Ideas
“The key criterion is a proposed solution’s alignment with Phil.Tech’s philosophy. That means that the solutions should be based on a B2B or a B2G model, employ modern IT technology and support the development of the third sector. We also paid attention to the extent to which the problem domain has been explored, the solutions’ scalability and manufacturability,” – explained Mr. Kuporosov.
The Marathon’s winner was announced to be the ITMO University student Roman Malyushkin who won the chance to participate in the Phil.Tech accelerator free of charge. He proposed a project for a donorship organization service. Roman has served as an organizer for the university’s Donor Day for the last few years and he knows how important it is to standardize, simplify and tune the relationships between the blood transfusion stations, donors and the host organizations.
Donor Day at ITMO University
“The idea of automatizing the business process of an event is not new. Our service – the donor event support system “eDonor” – is the logical conclusion to the years of experience we accumulated organizing the Donor Day at ITMO University. After going through several iterations – starting with VK discussion threads and ending with Google Forms – we decided to develop a custom instrument that could help us automatize the organizational activities for donor events. The idea gained the approval of the St. Petersburg Donor Foundation and soon our system will see use not only at our university, but at many other institutions of our city,” – shared Mr. Malyushkin.
You can find out more about eDonor here.
The system will be tested as early as autumn – as part of the Donor Day at ITMO University, after which it will be offered for use to other universities. The system is being developed by students of the Department of Intelligent Technologies in Humanities, although the team is open to new members.
Donor Day at ITMO University
The organizers of the event also made note of a project by Alina Setova from the Charity Foundation Raoul: Ms. Setova developed a service for communication between volunteers and activists. The Raoul Foundation helps graduates of children’s homes, including those with disabilities, to lead independent lives.
