It’s time for a Hackathon between Police and Our Youth — From #MBKHack to UbuntuHack
For three years, Qeyno Labs has launched an event called a “hackathon” through our Hackathon Academy, our signature “popup school” that prepares low opportunity youth to come the developers, designers, and innovators of tomorrow.
From the first Black Male Achievement Hackathon with Startup Weekend in Oakland to our My Brother’s Keeper Hackathon Prep for Native youth in Albuquerque, New Mexico, our commitment to align our core values of play, empathy, and discovery to create social impact and social justice has emboldened our participants with a vision of what the future can be — inclusive and innovative.
It’s time for a change and in 2017, Qeyno will be launching a new portfolio of products that reflect the future that we see every day in our work to transform children’s lives. Our next hackathon school will not be our annual #MBKHack (My Brother’s Keeper Hackathon) but will be the launch of Hackathon Academy’s first hackathon school for reconciliation and innovation — UbuntuHack.
UbuntuHack is a hackathon between communities in conflict, and we are currently in talks with Oakland police and Oakland youth to come together, make history, and build the future — and we could use your help.
There have been hackathons held that included police and youth, but UbuntuHack is an app building, rapid prototype testing, design thinking conversation BETWEEN youth and police and mediated by a volunteer cadre of engineers, developers, artists, entrepreneurs, activists, and more importantly — you! Everyone will be on a level playing field.
UbuntuHack Oakland will be launched in February 2017 and will gather youth from Oakland (and around the country) in addition to police from Oakland and the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area, but activists, tech companies, churches, and community organizations are all invited to take part in the formation of this experience and in ensuring that it is a safe and empowering space for all.
If UbuntuHack is successful, and we are confident it will be, it (we) can serve as a model for reconciliation and innovation for communities in conflict around the world and it starts in Oakland. We will be releasing more details at the “Future of Tech” event hosted by the East Bay College Fund on August 18th, 2016. Please reach us at team@qeyno.com or join us on our public Slack channel http://bit.ly/qeynopublic to learn more about how you can become a valuable part of making this happen.
A knowledge spillover creates innovation centers like Silicon Valley. Inclusive innovation is a knowledge and empathy spillover, and it’s that innovation our generation (and generations prior) can pass on to the next.
In Memory of Nelson Mandela. Happy Birthday Madiba.
