#code for good

[codemontage]

Honing Skills and Coding Change in Dallas

Coders in Dallas gathered last weekend to enjoy a day of coding for social good, giving back to the open source community, and connecting with each other at the University of Texas Dallas.

After an introduction to the day from CodeMontage CEO Vanessa Hurst, who discussed the nature of effective progress, participants got a peek into the wisdom of MaryAnne Faschan, the Vice President of Americas Applications Services at HP. She shared her most difficult career challenges and her greatest successes, sharing a number of important pieces of wisdom she has gained along the way. MaryAnne mapped out the crucial aspects to a leadership path in technology, including honing the skills of your craft, using lateral career moves to broaden your knowledge, and accepting stretch challenges in order to grow.

“Every time I asked to be put in over my head - and I hope you do the same - my senior team gave me the scuba gear I needed and let me go.” -- MaryAnne Faschan

Inspired by MaryAnne, developers from local universities and businesses jumped into the work of learning and coding. Supporting causes from middle-school education to disaster relief to tech accessibility, participants took the time to set up their computers and begin fixing technical problems and proposing changes.

A particularly large group of Coder Day attendees were driven to propose UX adjustments, helping improve the user experience and making apps that were easier for their audience to understand and use effectively. Many other developers created new features or fixed existing bugs, connecting directly with project maintainers using the CodeMontage community. Throughout the afternoon, participants were focused on their goals, working through the challenges to make change happen.

At the end of the day, the coders gathered to share their learning, acknowledge their accomplishments, and thank others who had helped them throughout the event. With a break to deliberate, HP awarded generous prizes to developers based on their contributions and their demonstrations of persistence and collaboration throughout the day.

The day was a wonderful success for the open source projects involved - over sixty contributions were made! Many thanks to all the developers who came out to join us.

[codemontage]

CodeMontage ended February with an amazing trip to Houston, TX to host an HP Coder Day of Service. After an introduction about the power of open source code from CodeMontage CEO & Founder Vanessa Hurst, HP's Chief Diversity Officer Brian Tippens shared an examination of the different types of innovation. He encouraged the coders in attendance to push for heretical innovation - a creativity and problem-solving method that questions the status quo and defies expectations.

Mr. Tippens was an inspiring start to the day, and he even granted some attendees a quick selfie before encouraging us all to continue the conversation online.

But right at that moment there was less talking, more coding! Developers worked to configure their computers for the open source project of their choosing. Seated around the assigned table for their project, groups were working together with professionals and project leads to debug errors and share their learning through code contributions. Excitement was high, and the energy attendees were putting in was palpable.

While participants worked through lunch to push each codebase forward, ad-hoc lessons on new technologies and methods were emerging all around the room.

At the end of the day, coders stood together to share big wins and small ones. Some notable achievments included:

Submitting a first pull request

Learning how to use git and GitHub for the first time

Supporting other coders towards their own breakthroughs

Adjusting broken documentation details for a project

Using the syntax for a new programming language

Working as a team to debug errors

Discovering ways to contribute even with limited programming experience

...Not to mention the 25+ contributions to the projects themselves!

The day ended with ten developers receiving prizes and recognition for their work. Congratulations to all our winners, and thank you to everyone who attended. We can’t wait to see you next time!

[hackduke]

TransitShed Visualization for El Camino Real BRT

Here in the Bay Area, the transit system has problems with connectivity. And we have a tradition o...

A super interesting visualization on the Bay Area's transit. At the Hack My Ride hackathon, Adina Levin and Ian Rees created a tool to visualize transitshed differences between transit service scenarios. This allows users to explore how each scenario provides access to housing, major employment centers, and service to transit-dependent populations.

[webuildnyc]

Bill Crommie, Significance Labs

Bill Crommie Co-founder Significance Labs Significance Labs is located in another open shared workspace at the Blue Ridge Foundation. We meet with Bill inside the central sitting area, near to Kinvolved and TallyVote. Q: So how did you get involved in this work? A: I was the CTO of several different tech startups. i had been observing for a long time that engineers solves problems for engineers. They make good money and are upper middle class and solve kind of upper middle class problems. It isn't really about access to the technology, but what that technology can do. This past year we had our first fellowship class. There were five teams, six fellows total. All from the tech world. We had people who had previously done project and product teams for Facebook, LinkedIn, Huge. During the course of the summer, we immersed them into low income communities. We had teams of engineers and designers who implemented those prototypes and iterated and iterated and finally launched it. Some if the products include: Easy Food Stamps- an easy way to register for food stamps from your mobile or on the web. Easy droid- an iOS system for the elderly On Track- a software that tracks first generation college students ReBankMe- Built credit with loans of $20 or so for metro cards NeatStreak- customer management tool for domestic workers. The app helps overcome language and expectation issues. It is good for employers who increasingly want to manage and pay over the phone. Q: What did you do before this? A: I was in New York doing mercenary sorts of things. Making money. I worked for a company that made original brand materials for MySpace. Until that became all advertising. Q: What did you look for in fellows? A: People who have experience starting companies, running product teams, entrepreneurs, business runners. Combining entrepreneurial drive and the product savvy. We also recruited hackers in residence and designers in residence. Q: Was it hard finding people to fill those positions? A: People want to work in stuff that makes a difference. The difficulty is there aren't a lot of places you can do that that are interesting. Like doing tech work for a non-profit you do a lot of small internal stuff like create a database to track donors. It is important, but not compelling. You don't solve problems. This is really building something that real people touch that helps them and they interact with.. Q: How do we get tech ppl to buy into an idea that isn't their own? A: Leadership is the ability to tell stories about what it is you want to do. It is also being empathetic to what it is that you're asking someone to do. You persuade people. Everyone's input is important also for retaining talent. No one wants to feel like a code monkey. People like to contribute to a cause that is bigger than themselves. Q: In situations where people don't have the same language (tech vs public). How do you build an understanding of your idea a tech background? A: Honestly, that's really hard. You could probably ask any software engineer: Their uncle or their sister is like, "I have this great for an app... It's like Facebook for dogs. Just copy and paste the app and call it dog book." Which brings me to another point, I think people often start companies for the wrong reasons. -It looks good on a résumé. -It will make money. -It's the cool thing to do The only good reason to start something is because it is a thing that must exist and is constantly driving you crazy and you have to make it a real thing. Q: I'd love to hear more about the integration into the community process. A: Well we're part of the Blue Ridge Foundation. They are the frontline organization that deals with community members. The organizations agreed to let us meet their clients. They conducted focus groups as well. We also did a day in the life exercise. Like on Sunday to just go hang out with people and spend time with people in their experiences in their lives. At first it wasn't trying to come up with solutions. Just experience a day in the life of someone else. Then we did brainstorming with the community members. We had about 150 people in our community group. Q: How did the fellows find this experience? A: They has really positive reactions, people really made friends. One guy, the CTO of Huge, really connected with one of the participants. Q: In what ways do you think we can be creating these connections outside of this program? A: To be honest, not a lot of ways to create these connections outside if what we do. For example, if you're gonna build a new app- you build it on apple phones first because more affluent people use iphone. "You can literally draw an income gradiation of people who have android phones." Creating space for that is difficult- it's not only across class lines, it's also geographic. You have multiple impediments. Tech is in a mercenary - making lot of money- mode. If you're trying to make a lot of money, you're not going to focus there on the social benefit. Not that there isn't money to be made there. Financial inclusion is like 1 Trillion dollar market. If you go to the SNAP offices there are businesses lined up out the door.

[hackduke]

Five Healthcare Hacks at PennApps X

Patient, doctor, and caregiver apps for a better tomorrow

Here are some healthcare hacks that were made at PennApps earlier this season! Massive props to the hackers who worked on these!

[hackduke]

Access To Anyone Who Needs It

At HackTheNorth, Michael Olaya, Alisha Ukani, Chris Bolton and Steven Connors created Project Seed, which is an off grid web server configured as a wireless access point. Anyone can access it from their mobile phone or their desktop computer and it is mounted with a TB full of meaningful information from Wikipedia, MIT Open Courseware and more!

This is an amazing step towards empowering local communities that might not have stable access to the internet with more information and a place to learn.

Check out their Github repo here! https://github.com/alisha/seed

[hackduke]

Music To My Ears

At the Music Ed Hackathon in New York last year, Kai Cheng, Salil Navgire, Langdon Crawford and Ying-Ying Zhang created AIR Trainer, a way for students to learn to match pitches using a leap motion and a computer. It's a great way to explore music without the use of any one instrument!

Take a look at their demo video below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHyZ_1069yw&feature=youtu.be

[hackduke]

Protecting Elephants And Preventing Wildfires

Super super awesome! Mercy Sigey from Kenya developed a sensor that could detect motion in a 9 meter radius with Arduinos that that act as environmental sensors and notify park officials of the presence of poachers and wildfires. You go girl! (:

http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/09/23/19-year-old-kenyan-girl-made-simple-device-stop-poaching-and-save-elephants?cmpid=tp-ptnr-upworthy

http://www.innovatekenya.org/finalist/national-park-tech/