Sign up for DSA hackathon!

The Digital Services Act (DSA) is a set of rules that regulate the responsibilities of online intermediaries, including platforms such as social media networks and online marketplaces. Its aim is to create a safer digital space where the fundamental rights of all users are protected, with clear obligations for platforms according to their size, role and impact. Transparency is a key focus of these obligations, including data access for research into systemic risks and their mitigations.

As the DSA is set to apply to all platforms from 17 February, PEReN and the European Commission (represented by DG Connect and ECAT) are co-hosting the hackathon Digital Services (h)Acked, supported by IDRIS, the CNRS National Computing Centre, with the resources of the Jean Zay supercomputer.

The aim of the hackathon is to enhance the value of DSA transparency measures with an open source approach. It consists of two challenges;

• Challenge 1 is to construct a suite of open source tools for collecting, parsing and centralizing online platform transparency documentation.
• Challenge 2 is to develop a tool that draws on open source language models to provide substantiated answers (including pre-processing code where possible) to questions linked to platform data, particularly that made available via APIs.

Challenge 1 has started and is open for sign-ups until 22 January, and Challenge 2 will take place on 2 February in Brussels and you can sign up until 15 January.

Find out more about the challenges, the rules and how to sign up on PEReN’s website here.