The winners of MUNISS continue their successful cooperation with the city

The MUNISS inter-university competition, organised by the Brno City Council in cooperation with Masaryk University, changed this year from a six-month teamwork to a four-day hackathon. Students from three Brno-based universities worked on a topic assigned by the City of Brno. The winning team is now refining their proposal as part of the follow-up competition MUNISS+. The students will present the result at Urbis – The Smart Cities Meetup.

The 13th MUNISS inter-university competition is different from the previous years. More than six months of work on a team project has been replaced by an intensive four-day hackathon, making the competition more dynamic, cost-effective, and better suited to the needs of the city. "The new format of the competition allows us to get more interesting ideas for different theme assignments, even if not yet in final form. This means that there is no waste of students’ time and ideas like in the past when they worked out all the ideas into the final form, many of which ended up so-called in a drawer," explains the competition guarantor Eva Švandová from the Faculty of Economics and Administration, Masaryk University.

The competition has now moved on to the follow-up phase MUNISS+, in which the winners develop their projects in more detail. The team consisting of Eva Vlková, Veronika Mitická, Mikuláš Sejbal (Masaryk University), Nicole Cosansel, Jan Mašek (Mendel University) and Matej Matyska (Brno University of Technology) designed a mobile application that should facilitate the application process for the future years of MUNIISS, inform about successful student projects and build a common identity of students associated with Brno. They were inspired by Brno ID, which also emerged from the previous years of this competition.

On 19 March the winners presented their work to the Brno City Council's Commission for an Open and Smart City. The presentation took place in the Observatory and Planetarium on Kraví hora where the students had the opportunity to look behind the scenes of this state-subsidised organisation. The winning team also received feedback on 5 April at a workshop with Brno representatives. The presentation of the final solution in the form of a feasibility study will take place in June at Urbis – The Smart Cities Meetup.

All participants, regardless of how they were ranked in the hackathon, have the opportunity to participate in other interesting events as well. One of them is an excursion called See you in the Control and Command Centre, scheduled for 24 May. On the premises of Technické sítě Brno (“Brno Utilities”) the students will see places that are not normally accessible to the public: they will visit the modernised control and command room that controls lighting throughout Brno, the city's collector network or the underground data centre. And last but not least, they will also get to know in more detail how the Brno ID system works.

The MUNISS project has been engaging creative and talented young people with the development of Brno for more than ten years. Seventeen students participated in this year's competition, setting up three teams. In addition to the financial prize for the winner, the participants learned detailed information about how the city actually functions. According to the competition guarantor, the students are also interested in networking and meeting across universities. "The participants gained experience from working in teams and thanks to the hackathon they had the opportunity to develop their creative thinking for the benefit of the city of Brno," summarises Eva Švandová.