Today, more than 70 representatives from various industries gathered in Valmiera to jointly search for innovative solutions to promote accessibility to water tourism, participating in the hackathon “The Ripple Effect: Accessibility Innovations in Water Tourism”.
The hackathon takes place as part of the Vidzeme Innovation Week. The Vidzeme Planning Region organizes the hackathon in cooperation with the Kurzeme Planning Region and the University of Tartu Pärnu College. It is one of the activities of the project “Facilitating access to watertourism activities” (Riverways II). The event aims to find new solutions and opportunities to adapt water tourism services and routes to broader groups of people, especially seniors, people with disabilities, and families with children.
Environmental accessibility expert Jurģis Briedis introduced the hackathon with a presentation on the needs of people with disabilities, encouraging the hackathon participants to immediately apply the newly acquired information while working on developing their ideas. 8 teams are participating in the event, which, during intensive work, initially proposed a total of 80 new ideas of which in the work process the eight best were selected for testing.
In parallel with the teamwork, the project “Facilitating access to watertourism activities” (Riverways II) partners gathered in a separate meeting to evaluate the achievements made during the first period of the project implementation and outline the tasks to be performed in the next period.
The first day has ended successfully. Tomorrow, work on refining the ideas will continue. At the end of the hackathon, the jury will evaluate the developed ideas, and the winning team will receive the main prize – an experience exchange trip to Finland.
The Interreg Estonia – Latvia Programme 2021 – 2027 financially supports the event.
