HackDuke Fall 2014
Social Good Hackathons Can Change Lives
It’s been a year.
A year since Dennis Li pitched me the idea of HackDuke, since HackKitty was born, since I had any idea what a hackathon was.
Within that time, the HackDuke team planned out and built an amazing community around coding for good. HackDuke transformed from a general hackathon to one that works closely with its local community, inspires a love for harnessing the power of technology in order to give back, and creates projects that are meaningful and impactful.
Our team was well aware of the additional layer of complexity that the social good theme would add to HackDuke. But we believed that with hard work, research, preparation and communication we would be able to successfully scale a social good themed hackathon (and be the first university to do so).
This weekend, I led the third iteration of HackDuke with some of the most amazing teammates and friends I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with in my life, and it was freaking amazing.
540 Participants, 25 Universities
1 amazing experience.
We were absolutely blown away at the level of interest in a social good hacakthon from all across the continent. HackDuke pulled in not only students from Duke, UNC and NC State but also from universities all over the nation and Canada.
What united our participants was the enthusiasm shown for the theme. Our programmers genuinely cared about social issues and working towards building something that would better their community.
I’d love to make my contribution to the collaboration going on at HackDuke, which I believe stands out for it’s dedication to giving back to the community.
I want to attend HackDuke in part because I want to see, build and learn from substantial, thought-provoking projects.
There’s enormous potential to use technology for good and if we spent even a fraction of the time and resources we all spend on solving first-world problems, we could make a huge difference. I’ve been looking for ways to meet like-minded people and I think this would be the perfect place to do so.
95 Mentors, 25 Sponsors
1 big community.
In order for a social good hackathon to be successful, we needed guidance. Lots of it.
At HackDuke Spring 2014, we had a mentor to student ratio of 1 to 6, and we were determined to keep it that way. Mentors from the intersection of software engineering and non-profit world were the best, because they not only understand the feasibility and sustainability of a certain hack, but also understand the technical possibilities and limitations. Our mentors provided the context for ideas, technical guidance, career advice as well as tips on how to further get involved with social good as a programmer.
Community Mentors
We partnered up with the Kenan Institute of Ethics and Code for Durham in order to provide the social good context for the participants. Adam Martin from Code for Durham held community round tables and datajams leading up to HackDuke for each of the four impact tracks (Health & Wellness, Poverty & Inequality, Education, and Energy & Environment) in order to identify community needs and assess what it meant for a hack to be successful in addressing certain social issues.
We made sure to remind our community partners that the goal of these roundtables were not to provide spec work for our participants, but to provide inspiration for ideas and real world problems to tackle.
Software Engineering Mentors
Our software engineering mentors came from all different kinds of companies, but we also made sure to invite mentors from companies that were relevant to the different tracks of impact. Coursera, Versal and LearnSprout were all ed-tech companies that provided real examples of how technology was able to revolutionize education. Epic represented a med-tech company that played a huge role in intersection of technology, medicine and healthcare.
Many companies like Microsoft, IBM, Citrix, Google and eBay also presented the ways that their respective companies engaged in philanthropy through tech talks.
Inclusivity
Anyone can hack, build and make a difference.
This year, our team made an active effort to make HackDuke Fall 2014: Code for Good inclusive and open to everyone. We implemented a few initiatives to help more hackers feel welcome and comfortable at our event.
Novice Hackers
At HackDuke, there was a specific room and a prize for novices (first time hackers, first time programmers, or both). The goal of these initiatives was not to isolate novices, but to have a designated space for them to receive help from mentors, fellow hackers and support each other in their projects. Additionally, we strongly encouraged all of our mentors to interact and help the novices as much as they could, and make themselves as accessible to them as possible. During the opening ceremony, 50% of the participants raised their hands when we asked them whether this was their first hackathon.
Lady Hackers
We wanted to provide specific events for women that gave them the opportunity to feel more comfortable and connect with others in the same boat.
Three weeks before the hackathon, we hosted and live streamed a Ladies Interest Meeting where we invited 3 female Duke alumni software engineers to answer any questions about the experience of working in the industry as well as tips and tricks to improve as a programmer. I had also made myself available after the Q&A session to demystify any misconceptions of hackathons.
The Friday before HackDuke, we teamed up with Microsoft and invited all of the female mentors from sponsoring companies that could make it out early to do a meet and greet dinner with our local female participants.
On the night of HackDuke, we hosted a Ladies Storm Hackathons Cupcake Meetup. Shivani Negi from Georgia Tech hosted a casual web dev walkthrough on Heroku, Bootstrap and Git.
Overall, we saw an increase in female participation from previous years. We had around 125 female participants (23% attendance) and around 65 ladies from our own university (30% of Duke participants were female).
Projects & Parting Thoughts
The aftermath.
Projects
Out of the 76 submitted projects, we awarded a grand prize for each area of impact. The winning team got a chance to donate $750 to a non-profit of their choice.
The winner for each track were as follows:
Education — JustRead, a 50¢ smartphone-based scanner so simple, it can be used by the blind to read any document.
Health & Wellness — FlashAid, an android app that pushes the limits of emergency medical response by crowdsourcing community first responders.
Energy & Environment — Compost Crony, a web app that encourages and facilitates composting.
Poverty & Inequality — DailyDonor, a web app that streamlines the ad-viewing process to make it very easy for users to watch the videos and donate to a charity of their choice.
Parting Thoughts
After a long, but exciting weekend, the HackDuke team collapsed into hibernation mode. As some of us awoke from our slumbers to get back into the groove of schoolwork, we received a lot of truly inspirational comments about HackDuke.
I had a ridiculously awesome time at HackDuke this weekend. I flew across the country without an idea or a team. I spent the first few hours acquiring swag and attending tech talks, and then walked around helping newbies with the homie Soryah that I stayed with the night before. The last newbie crew that we came across had a stellar idea and ended up being our team for the rest of the hackathon. Even though we had a late start, we shipped a product that we were all proud of. Weekend well spent.
Sleep deprived, exhausted, and ready to crash for days, but HackDuke was a fantastic first hackathon filled with fun all around. Thanks to my team, the mentors, and all the companies that made it what it was!
Tbh, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I registered, but I had so much fun and learned a ton! (aka EVERYTHING I know about programming) I also met some really, really cool people from not just Duke from all over the continent, some of whom were in the same boat as me, this being their first hackathon and all. Super-shoutout to all the mentors, fellow hackers, HackDuke staffers and volunteers who helped us throughout the 24 hours we learned web development. There’s no way we would have created what we did without any of you guys!
I finally return back to Columbia multiple pounds heavier than I left. But despite the physical weight I bring back, my heart and mind are soaring. I spent the weekend at Duke University, attending HackDuke, a hackathon for social good. I made tons of new cool friends, and had an amazing time down South.
…we came to hack with the primary intention of immersing ourselves in hands-on learning, perhaps entertaining some mild ideas of winning the novice prize. But after a mostly sleepless night spent (attempting to) deploy code in languages we’d never programmed in before and about 70 too many JavaScript and composting tabs open simultaneously, I have to say that I’m extremely happy with the result. Great friends, great effort, and great times; couldn’t have asked for more this weekend.
