Hack4Impact UIUC Spring ’19 Projects Kick-Off 🚀
At Hack4Impact UIUC, our mission is to increase awareness of technology’s potential for social good. This spring semester, we are partnering with 3 nonprofit organizations (Kiva, GlobalGiving, and Cut to the Case) to build products that further their mission. We are also launching 2 new initiatives in conjunction with these client teams. Take a look at how our teams are leveraging technology to tackle a diverse set of problems!
1) Kiva
Kiva is a non-profit organization which crowd-funds loans for lower-income and underserved people all across the world. The organization firmly believes that community funding is one of the most powerful ways to generate social good and reach thousands of individuals worldwide.
How We’re Helping
Our team is building a web application that streamlines the process of on-boarding international organizations by making interactions between Kiva employees more centralized and efficient. Users will be able to see required documents, notifications, and other important information all in one portal.
Vision
“I’m excited to build a very simple and intuitive application even if our backend has many interfacing parts, and to work with the various different skill levels and mindsets we have on our team and watch everyone grow.”
— Arpan Laha, Product Manager
“I’m looking forward to designing an application with so many different parts and watching the functionality slowly come together as the team begins development.”
— Roy Chiu, Tech Lead
2) Global Giving
GlobalGiving is a purpose-driven crowdfunding platform which connects nonprofits, both domestic and international, with donors. They emphasize finding nonprofits which are created by and serve their local communities.
How We’re Helping
This semester, we will create a system which aids GlobalGiving’s mission by categorizing the work that nonprofits do. It’s important for GlobalGiving to have this information so they can properly characterize the organization and, in the event of a disaster, can quickly find the appropriate nonprofits to help.
Vision
“I’m excited to build a data science project as a team, as this is new territory for Hack4Impact. This project has a lot of brain-teasing data and algorithm problems to solve, and I’m excited for those to push us all to give our best solution.”
— Joshua Burke, Product Manager
“I’m excited to apply seven of Hack4Impact’s minds to a problem which is unlike any we’ve solved so far; the design considerations we discuss are new to every one of us, so everybody on the team (Josh and I included) will learn something new through the process.”
— Aryn Harmon, Tech Lead
3) Cut to the Case
Cut to the Case is a UIUC based nonprofit whose initial mission was to help victims of sexual assault, but has now expanded to improving the safety of all students on campus. This semester, Cut to the Case wants to continue adding features to the mobile app our team created last semester.
How We’re Helping
Our team is building an easily interfaceable, open source, cross-platform mobile application that allows students to view and submit tips for certain times and places on campus.
Vision
“I’m excited to finalize the app and get it into the hands of students across campus. I’m also looking forward to working with the school to advertise the app and help freshman on campus learn about the campus.”
— Shreyas Mohan, Product Manager
“I’m excited to see our team members push themselves to grow technologically and personally and to see our app come together and help students from UofI feel safer on campus.”
— Megha Mallya, Tech Lead
4) Product Infrastructure
Many of the nonprofits Hack4Impact works with end up creating projects that have an authentication system. Often times, every team develops their own version of it, but many times cut corners in order to focus on the rest of the product and deliver in a timely fashion. This opens up many potential vulnerabilities in the implemented security system.
How We’re Helping
The goal of product infrastructure is to build generalized solutions to these problems. We are building an open sourced authentication system with easy integration and well-thought out solutions for allowing users to securely handle signing up for an account, logging in, changing passwords, and promoting people to different levels of access
Vision
“I’m excited to work with a group of talented individuals on a product that would be used by other teams in Hack4Impact and the open source community.”
— Hana Rimawi, Product Manager
“I’m excited to see our team grow, learn, and use their experiences from previous hack4impact projects to develop infrastructure that will help us all of our teams higher quality products. Also for all the food we’re gonna make at team hangouts.”
— Aria Malkani, Tech Lead
5) Product Research
As an organization, we have the unique opportunity of being constantly exposed to both nonprofits and social impact problems. How might we expand beyond our current project based model and increase our social impact? The product research team is a new initiative that seeks to drive our mission of tech and social impact forward.
How We’re Helping
This semester we are jumpstarting our project sourcing process early with the goal of creating higher quality and heavily researched projects to tackle in our future semesters. Ultimately, this team will uncover opportunities for our organization to expand our social impact and strengthen the longevity of our future products by working to deeply understand and address the relevant needs of a wider nonprofit pool.
Vision
“I’m incredibly excited to lead this new initiative — I truly believe in the power of empathy and can’t wait to work closely with my team in deeply understanding nonprofit needs and honing in on where we can deliver the greatest value.”
— Annie Wu, Team Lead
Curious to see our final products? Come out to our Product Showcase event on Sunday, April 28th where we will demo our products and take you through our designing, developing, and launching process!
We pride ourselves in that all our projects are open-sourced. Check us out on our Github! You can also find more exciting updates on our Facebook and Website 🌎
