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Unite Community

A large group of people sitting on bean bags and chairs on a rooftop at night, with a city skyline in the background.

Unite Community is the Foundation’s convening programme. It operates the Foundation’s hackathon series, ecosystem tours, peer-exchange roundtables, and the institutional partnerships that keep Kyrgyzstan’s technology community connected to regional and global counterparts. Convening creates the conditions in which the Foundation’s evidence and capacity work can land — without it, even the best research and training do not move into the hands of practitioners.

— What convening produces

Sustained convening across more than a decade has produced an institutional record that other actors can draw on: a documented peer network, a body of partnerships that survives staff transitions, and a list of named participants who have stayed involved with the Foundation’s work as their own careers have evolved.

Hackathons

The Foundation has run five major hackathons since 2015, each with a sectoral focus and named partners. The full record is on the Timeline. Documented outputs include:

  • Garage48 Bishkek 2015 — first 48-hour hackathon at scale; AUCA campus; Estonian mentors Jaanus Sakkis and Kai Isand; winner Segmently advanced to the Slush Conference, Finland.
  • Media Hackathon 2017 — co-organised with the Youth Council C5+1; partners AUCA, US Embassy, Internews Kyrgyzstan; theme «Safe City, Safe Environment»; twelve competing teams including Kloop Media.
  • Travel and Tourism Hackathon 2016 — AUCA + Ololohaus; supported by the US Embassy and USAID Business Development Initiative; winner Team Challengers (Trelper).
  • E-Commerce and FinTech Hackathon 2019 — funded by GIZ Trade Facilitation Central Asia; 170+ applications, 12 finalist teams; winner RofDev with AgroSale.
  • Future Agro Challenge 2015 — global agri-tech competition; KG Labs received the FAC Host of the Year third-place award at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress, Medellín; national winner Tilek Toktogaziev.

Tech Ecosystem Tours

The Foundation’s KG Tech Ecosystem Tours programme connects international visitors with Kyrgyzstan’s technology companies, startups, and ecosystem actors. Documented hosted visits include Christophe Viguerie (Tech&Co Thailand) and Maxime Schmitt (NextSteps Systems Thailand) in May 2018; Paul Bragiel (Bragiel Brothers, Silicon Valley) in September 2018 — see the Bragiel visit; and Columbia University SIPA students in May 2018, hosted jointly with ISOC Kyrgyz Chapter and the High Tech Park.

Convening Series

The Foundation runs sustained convening series in specific policy domains:

  • FinTech Series 2018–2019 — four events with NPS Elcart and the Interbank Processing Center, plus three case battles in 2019 covering QR payments and remote identification. Series record →
  • TechWomen Alumni Talks — multi-year programming with the US State Department’s TechWomen alumni network.
  • Forum of Cities, Bishkek 2017 — Smart Cities panel co-curated with the Civic Initiative on Internet Policy, Tajikistan.
  • Mercator Fellows meeting, Bishkek 2018 — institutional briefing with the Foundation’s ecosystem database.

Sister Initiatives

Where convening produces enough sustained engagement that a separate institution becomes warranted, the Foundation’s leadership has helped found one. Sister institutions co-founded by KG Labs leadership include the Internet Society Kyrgyz Chapter (ISOC KG), the Association of Business Angels of Central Asia (ABACA) with Rinat Abdrasilov in June 2022, and the Kyrgyz Go Federation. See Our Partners for the institutional network.

Unite Community sits alongside the Foundation’s other operational programme areas: Build Skills, Promote Smart Policies, Research, and Raise Awareness.