Hack For Social Justice — WWCode SV Annual Hackathon
12 hours, 12 submissions, 60 participants.
The Women Who Code’s “Hack For Social Justice” Hackathon kicked off with a great start on a bright Saturday morning at PayPal HQ in San Jose!
Participants from various industries and colleges came together to code for a social cause and bring about a change in the world we live in.
We kicked off the event with an introduction from our WWC Director, Leann Pereira and Lenny Markus from Paypal. Their speeches set the tone for the day and got the participants engaged from the start.
The WWC folks made sure the coders were able to sustain their progress by keeping them hydrated and nourished along with a healthy dose of optimism. Hackers took a break from all the thinking to relax their mind and body with a yoga session organized by Usha Sangam. Clearly, balancing on one leg was harder than coding!
“Developing software is very collaborative, the more that you focus on the people you’re with, in addition to the problem you’re trying to solve, the more successful you’ll be.” — Karin Golde, Director of Data Science and Linguistics at Netbase Solutions, Inc
Participants formed teams, sometimes with complete strangers, and then showed off their Java, Python, React, backend and frontend engineering skills at the Hackathon and ended up building innovative applications to support the social cause.
Our esteemed panel of all-women judges oversaw all participant presentations and determined the top three winners. Our judges included Karin Golde, Director of Data Science and Linguistics, Netbase Solutions, Inc., Ha Lee, VP of Engineering, Financial Engines, and Cindy Li, Software Engineer, VMWare.
In addition to having the opportunity to participate in an all-women led hackathon, our judges expressed their enthusiasm about judging apps developed for social causes. Teams were judged on innovation, technical achievement, and impact on social good. One judge went on to say, “it was very difficult choosing the top three, there were many top-quality apps”.
The day started with participant registration with our friendly registration staff.
For many, this hackathon was their first. They were excited, but also optimistically cautious. Next, our participants were gifted with swag from several sponsors and a bounty of tasty breakfast treats. And finally, the hackathon began.
Lots of ideas, questions, and ah-ha moments from our 60 participants. After twelve fun-filled, creative hours, we had our winners!
Winners
1st Place Best Overall ($100) — Justice Match: The Social Justice Network. This is a platform that allows organizers looking for volunteers and people looking to join cause to come together. Built with Python, Flask, JavaScript, Twitter, TWURL, and React-Native. Link: https://wwc-sv-hackathon-2017.devpost.com/submissions/79388-justicematch
2nd Place Best Overall ($80) — Happy Meeting : Promoter of social inclusion in communication by analyzing people’s conversations! A prototype web application that demonstrates how the application can take an audio recording uploaded by user, run speaker recognition algorithms on it, and build graphs for two basic metrics: 1. duration of speech in percentile for each participant in the conversation. 2. Who spoke during which time frame of the meeting — Speaker vs Time.Built with Gunicorn, Flask, Python, VoiceID, React.js, MongoDB, and Photoshop.
https://wwc-sv-hackathon-2017.devpost.com/submissions/80155-happy-meeting
3rd Place Best Overall — A RemeNeed: A RemeNeed built an Android app that provides help to people in need, particularly in times of natural disasters. Their app not only connects a requester with a receiver but in addition provides the means of transport, getting goods from requester to receiver.
Special thanks to our sponsors PayPal,Tableau, Financial Engines, VMWare and Startup Wonder for helping us organize this wonderful event in the heart of the Silicon Valley!
