2014 ATX Hack for Change Recap

Originally published on the Clarify.io blog. View archived copy.

This past weekend was the second annual ATX Hack for Change in conjunction with the National Day of Civic Hacking. For the second time, St Edward’s University was the lead organizer and host of the entire event. They were gracious enough to give us Ragsdale Center (student union) for the entire weekend. From top to bottom, there were hundreds of hackers and problem solvers working on solutions to problems brought by non-profit organizations throughout Austin.

A few things made this event stand out:

First, were the people. We had nearly 300 people registered to hack and change the world. Even more surprising is that roughly half of them are women. We found out that by portraying the even as more than just a normal hackathon but a problem solving event, we drew from groups who have never attended hackathons.

Next, the way we approached the projects. Unlike most hackathons – which are focused on doing something clever and often see the project die on Sunday night – we wanted to figure out a way to have the projects live on. Therefore, we worked with 25 local non-profits to help define, describe and scope projects that solved actual problems they deal with on a day to day basis. This included groups ranging from Love Is Respect to the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas to Austin Freespace. Each non-profit provided a Project Champion to act as an owner for the weekend to scope the effort, answer questions and generally be a subject matter expert.

And finally, and most importantly. the solutions to the projects. This year we had a number of great projects but three that were particularly interesting included the Girls Scouts of Central Texas, Pet Finder, and Texas Appleseed.

• The Girls Scouts of Cental Texas set out to build an application to document their Gold Projects. A Gold Project is the community service project required to be granted the highest recognition in their organization. The majority of their team – known as the Coder Girls – were teenage girls who spent the weekend designing their forms, learning how to use systems like Laravel and MySQL, and got a crash course in Git.
• The next group was Pet Finder. While Austin animal shelters are no-kill, when you lose a pet, you only have 72 hours to claim it before it can be adopted out by other people. The existing system requires you to browse through pages of results in an attempt to find your pet. On the other hand, Pet Finder allows you to set up a simple query (ie. small black dog) and get emails or text messages via Plivo when matching pets are found.
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  TX Appleseed, 2014 ATX Hack for Change

  The final group – Texas Appleseed – worked to address one of the problems that foster kids face. When foster kids turn 18, they “age out” of the system, are handed a number of important documents – such as Social Security Card, birth certificate, etc – and enter the world. Unfortunately, without the structure and support of a family, all of their possessions – including these documents – are at risk of being lost, stolen, or destroyed. Texas Appleseed’s solution was to provide an online encrypted repository to store and protect these documents so these foster kids can access them how, when, and where they’re needed.

While this is only scheduled to be an annual event, there is enough interest in these projects that the Open Austin group has laid out plans to take some of the projects forward. Even better, we’re looking at doing a followup hackathon in September to finish some of the longer term projects. If you’re in the area, we hope to see you there!

Many of the projects can be found in the ATX Hack for Change Github account. If you see something particularly useful or interesting, feel free to fork and extend it or get in touch with the project owners. Feel free to comment below or tweet at us to get in touch with OP3Nvoice.

All images were used from the City of Austin Chief Innovation Officer Kerry O’Connor’s public Twitter feed.