How Hackathons Could Make World Peace a Reality
Article originally published in GOOD
Sustainable Development Goal 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels.
Activist and technologist Hera Hussain does not have a lot of free time. Sure, she has a full-time job as a community manager of the world’s largest open database of corporate data, but that’s just the start of it. The London resident runs workshops for a global network of social entrepreneurs known as MakeSense and, as the founder of advocacy group Chayn—an open-source project that leverages technology to empower women against violence and oppression so they can live happier and healthier lives—spends a great deal of her time working on issues at the intersection of tech and gender.
Past Chayn projects have included a hackathon to create solutions to end sexual violence in conflict zones and an online toolkit for domestic abuse survivors to build their own legal case. When you look at Hussain and Chayn’s work, you start to see a theme emerge: using tech to place agency in the hands of people who are most overlooked by society. It just so happens, Hussain says, those people most often tend to be women, especially women of color and those living in the developing world.
“[In the civil society sector], you either have events that just focus on women—which is great, because it brings much-needed attention to the needs of women—or you have events that are completely dominated by men and are either forgetting that women exist or have separate issues,” Hussain says. “There’s very little middle ground that uses an integrated women lens as part of a broader focus of solving societal challenges. ”
