SF Hackivation
Put 40 developers in a old victorian mansion house in San Francisco, add social innovation projects that need development help, stir in food and a dash of beer to create a recipe for spontaneous community and cooperative innovation.
This is what happened on June 8th when ReAllocate hosted its first Hackivation, sponsored by RYOT Magazine and Captivate.me. Our partners, Bay Bucks, Poll Vault, Hero Hatchery, Stop the Pity and RYOT Magazine brought their teams, opened up their code base and presented development challenges for participants to dig into!
Teams self organized around the projects they wanted to work on and everyone was coding up a storm within an hour of the kick off presentations. Chong Kee, a co-founder of Bay Bucks, came looking for a mobile app to allow customers to use their local currency on their phones. Bay Bucks had a hiccup with their API but the team perservered and built the mobile app through help from UI/UX designers and full-stack developers. “The hackathon also totally exceeded my expectations. Previous hackathon I’ve been to spent a lot of time pitching different ideas, form and reform teams, and little time coding. This one had a very clean pitching phase because of pre-selection and it freed up ample time to code.” -Chong Kee
People could be found spread through the house hacking on their chosen projects. Chefs where in the kitchen preparing food to keep the teams focused and videographers moved between rooms to capture the energy and share the story. Nolan Lee led his team to build a series of visualization features for PollVault to help people vote smarter and share information about upcoming elections. Nolan was up until 5 AM the night before preparing for the Hackivation and his pre planning paid off big in getting all his desired features built. “All in all, Hackivation was a rousing success for us. My key takeaways are these: 1) The more you prepare, the better your results will be. 2) Cast a wide net in scoping your project so that anyone can contribute in some capacity. 3) Hackers with good minds AND good hearts are gold… treat them that way and you will be richly rewarded.”
