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Aug 11, 2016

Hacking Is Here For Good

A political activist enters the mysterious world of hackathons | Colette Phair

As we push through the shining glass doors of PayPal, a place I had until now thought of as mere 1s and 0s that helped me conveniently pay for hipster goods on Etsy, I ask myself ‘What have I done?’ For the next 72 hours this will be my home, shared with engineers hoping to think up and build as much of an iPhone app as they can in this time, many of whom will literally live here, sleeping in tents on the ground and subsisting on Soylent, endless snacks, and mercifully, real food, thanks to our friendly iOSDevCamp hosts Dom Sagolla, Christopher Allen, Jennifer Holmes, and Paul Blair.

Lately I’ve been at a lot of political events focused on the 2016 general election. But in here, I’m lost. No one is wearing a candidate button! How will I know who is on my side?* As we take seats in the main hall, I ask my colleague, “Do any of these people care about social issues?” Usually balanced and articulate, he just shakes his head. “No.”

But I think I know what he means. Saving the world is not why most hackers hack at a hackathon. But couldn’t it be? Shouldn’t it be?

As I start talking to more of them, I find they do care. About what’s going to happen with the election and this country. About ISIS. About poverty. About Jill Stein, Bernie, Hillary, Gary Johnson, and Trump. I meet more conservative supporters than I’m used to in the San Francisco Bay area, and some who are disconnected from the voting process but happy to learn more, and even to tell their friends. I meet a 14-year-old girl named Emily, who does not yet know how to code but presents her design for a video game that would allow players to win coins or grains of rice that would translate into real-life charitable donations to those in need.

This is far from the traditional hacker archetype, a hooded figure in black, generally a dude, hunched alone in a dark room. Our hackathon brought over 200 people together, including 40% females and a range of national and ethnic backgrounds, encouraged by iOSDevCamp’s diversity discounts. It also goes against the stereotype of engineers in the San Francisco Bay area, where they’re blamed for rising rents and seen as disconnected from related issues of displacement and gentrification.

Hackathons originated as more underground events at the end of the 20th century, but today large companies like Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Foursquare hold hackathons internally and externally, where investors are often waiting for the next great idea.

When we went in, we expected little more for our own project than some interesting ideas and a bit of networking. We were blessed to find engineer Jay Akkiraju, who gave freely of his time to begin building whole new versions of our software for Android and iPhone. Saturday stretched from morning all the way to Sunday for some, and networking took a backseat to productivity as the main hall developed a “lived-in” smell. Yet the hackers persevered, motivated to learn something, build something, be part of something.

When the groups present their projects on Sunday afternoon, Dom reminds everyone “Just two days ago these were only ideas. Now you’re seeing them.”

If small groups of strangers can accomplish this much in a weekend, imagine how much we can do in a year. When the freedom and creativity of entrepreneurship meet a desire to build a better future, fueled by the power of technology, unexpectedly good things can happen.

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