Online Coaching

The Open Seventeen Challenge is the GTI’s online interactive coaching program to help young global innovators connect and shape good ideas into viable social innovation projects for the SDGs.

Open Seventeen Challenge supports projects that tackle SDG-related issues by enabling grassroots public participation and citizen science through the use of open data and crowdsourcing. The challenge is open to undergraduate students from any field and region, individually or in teams. 

Participants in the Open Seventeen Challenge are coached by academic experts and mentors from the UN. Online coaching takes place over five 2-hour, interactive sessions. Upon successful completion, some students are invited to present and develop their projects at international events and programs, such as the GTI SDG Summer School, WSIS Forum 2020 and AI for Good.

The Open Seventeen Challenge is used to select students for the SDG Summer School and attract candidates to the Dual Degree Master Program, part of the GTI comprehensive education programme for the SDGs.

The founding partners of the Open Seventeen Challenge, which was launched in 2015, are Citizen Cyberlab and GovLab. The Citizen Science Center Zurich and Tsinghua X-lab are partners since 2018. Since 2020, the Open Seventeen Challenge is supported by the Crowd4SDG project.