Hackathons are a great time to stretch creative abilities with software, sales, and general process creation. I was in my first one when I moved to San Francisco back in 2012 or so.
After being in a few, there was one that stood out. One was being put on by Change.org and they called it “Hack for Change”. The theme for the hackathon was ‘build something for social good’.
The real quick intro to what a hackathon is from my experience is its a time-constrained event with an overall theme to create a solution at the end of the timeframe by teams that self-organized from a pool of people that mostly dont know each other at the beginning of the event, but thats not a requirement.
The time constraint forces focus on the next step at every moment and at the end of the alotted time the team will pitch their idea and hopefully have a working prototype with ‘users’ or ‘customers’. Theres an option to have money prizes for the top teams, but also not required.
I would love to have this in Jacksonville, or some version of it to help the community.
The issues with running a hackathon to solve local problems, like those for non-profits and local charities is, with all due respect, a complete shit-show. Those organizations have their place, but when asking them to present problems to technical and creative teams, they just aren’t used to interfacing with that much firepower.
From the perspective of the creatives showing up to participate in this hackathon, they thrive on autonomy to come up with solutions for problems that they see differently.
For me, running a hackathon that helps the local community would be to organize the event much like the ones out in San Francisco so we don’t reinvent the wheel. Start at 5PM on a Friday, end on Sunday with the pitches starting at 5PM so theres an exact 48-hours given to these teams to operate with. There would be an executive and possibly one or two of their employees there to be present to answer any questions or present any current problems they think they have to any teams that are interested in hearing about the problems to see if it something they want to work on.
They keynote speaker, and thats all this event would have, no speaking at the end since it would be Sunday at 5PM and everyone’s brain is smoked from working non-stop for 48 hours, would just want to pitch and see how their idea holds up to the “judges”.
The hackathon at Change.org was directed towards “social good”. I like that. It leaves the problems to tackle open-for-interpretation by each team instead of shoe-horning them into working on problems for 1 specific charity or non-profit. Theres a different event that could be for that, and thats fine. For this event, it would be bring as many people together to work on solutions to problems within the community.