We challenge our employees and other developers, technologists and business professionals in our communities to use their experience and skills to help local nonprofits solve their most pressing tech problems. Now in its third year,
Opportunity Hack is a two-day hackathon open to the public and our teams.
This year, we’re holding four hackathons, two of which recently wrapped up in San Jose, CA, and Chandler, AZ, with more than 230 hackers and 22 nonprofits participating. In San Jose, 27 teams worked to help 14 nonprofits. And about 80% of those participants stayed overnight to work on their projects. Now that’s determination!
Keynote speaker Hillary Hartley, Deputy Executive Director and co-founder of 18F, a civic consultancy for based within the U.S. federal government, and a 2013 Presidential Innovation Fellow, emphasized putting the customer first and using design thinking.
Hillary Hartley giving her keynote address in San Jose.
The winning team in San Jose improved the search function and user interface for the
Alliance for CHANGE website—
ReentryHousing.org. The website is a resource for finding transitional housing for men and women who were recently incarcerated. Having never worked with Drupal (an open source content management system) before, the team quickly learned the backend framework to build a winning solution.
“Our team of volunteers brought us forward several steps. And they hope to continue helping us improve the site even more,” says Peter Myers, Director of Development, Alliance for CHANGE. “Because our project has such a small budget, we rely on pro-bono tech work. With six people dedicating their time to us over two days, we were able to evolve our site in a very short time."
From left to right: Alliance for CHANGE representatives, Rebecca Carter and Peter Myers joined the winning team – Shaishav Patel, Divya Shah, Amruta Thombare, Shreyas Bhat and Archit Trivedi.
In Arizona, Opportunity Hack was a co-sponsored event with
Seed Spot and American Express. Twenty-two teams (93 participants) hacked for eight non-profits.
This year, we saw solutions closer to completion than in previous years, where outcomes were more conceptual and design-based. Team outcomes this year, will genuinely help the nonprofits get closer to overcoming their challenges and better serve their communities.
And unfinished code isn’t going to waste.
All of the code that the developers worked on over the weekend has been checked into Github and we’ve ensured that anybody can use it if they’d like to contribute to the project. If the code isn’t complete, the nonprofits can have other volunteers pick up the code and complete it.
If you are interested in helping advance the projects from San Jose and Arizona, please check out the projects and associated code on Github. Click
here for San Jose and
here for Arizona.
And good news for those of you in Chennai and Bangalore, Opportunity Hack is making its way to you November 28-29. To register, click
here.