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An inclusive community-based civic hackathon in Western Mass

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Last week I had the honor and pleasure of attending the White House Champions of Change event for civic hacking and open government, where I met community leaders from all over the country. I heard many inspiring stories about civic change, and I’ve been reflecting on a few reasons why I think Hack for Western Mass was so successful.

When I first heard about the National Day of Civic Hacking earlier this year, I was excited. Having recently helped organize the Health Literacy Hackathon with CommunicateHealth, I knew the opportunity to make a positive impact was huge. But I thought civic hacking and open government were only possible in big cities. I was thrilled to be proven wrong.

In early March, I saw a tweet from Becky Sweger, who I met a few years ago at a local tech event. Over the following few weeks, a team of like-minded individuals assembled to plan a civic hackathon for Western Mass. We were web developers, organizers, and designers with a shared interest in creating community and empowering citizens through the creative use of technology. None of us knew each other well beforehand, but our commitment to the idea focused our work and created strong and lasting bonds. This was a microcosm of what would later happen at the hackathon.

Soliciting challenges from community organizations

At our first meeting in late March, we talked about the event format. We decided early on to follow the Random Hacks of Kindness model, and collect challenges from the community. We chose this model because we felt it would be the best way to bring a diverse array of people and organizations together and make the greatest impact on our community.

Defining challenges turned out to be just as interesting and difficult as addressing them. Because Western Mass had never had a civic hackathon before, our efforts to solicit challenges required a great deal of outreach and education. All of the organizers put countless hours into phone calls, meetings, and many follow-up emails in communication with community leaders. Most people had never heard of a hackathon, but were enthusiastic about the prospect of working together with volunteer technologists who wanted to help. I designed an infographic to help organization leaders think about what type of information needs could be addressed in a hackathon challenge.

As far as those proposing the challenges were concerned, we felt in order to encourage sustainable projects, we had to require the challenge representatives to be present for the entire event. This meant having to turn away some organizations that couldn’t attend, but we felt the requirement was worth it in the end. Having the challenge representatives present ensured that the work stayed focused on the issue in such a way that it would remain useful and sustainable for those organizations after the hackathon. Some of our local town governments were excited about the prospect of a civic hackathon, but were among those who weren’t available during the hackathon weekend — though we hope to engage with them in the future.

Can hackathons really “solve problems”?

Our tagline for the event was “Local Folks Solving Local Problems.” MIT Media Lab student Charlie DeTar argued recently that hackathons don’t solve problems — big problems at least. Making an impact on the issues that face our communities usually requires long-term boots-on-the-ground community organizing. So what’s the point of a civic hackathon? DeTar says, “Hackathons can spur creativity, can inspire a concerted amount of development effort on a focused project for a short period of time, and can increase attention to a critical issue. For people who feel disaffected and hopeless, a hackathon can rekindle a sense of creativity and possibility.”

While I think “solving problems” worked well as a shorthand to help people understand the purpose of the event, “responding to challenges” might be a more accurate way to describe what we did. “Solving” implies one definitive answer, and “problems” has perhaps too negative of a connotation. It also leaves out the possibility that a response to challenges yields unexpected positive results and partnerships that may fall outside the purview of  a strictly defined “solution.”

Designer Frank Chimero addresses this in his book The Shape of Design: “The products of design are more negotiations of issues and responses to problems than absolute, fixed solutions, and this provides plenty of space for different takes and perspectives. …The best design has to offer much more than making problems go away. It helps us live well by producing and elevating new kinds of value, such as engagement, participation, and happiness. These are design’s true outcomes, because the practice, at its root, is simply people making useful things for other people.”

I agree with Alan Palazzolo’s belief that hackathons are community building events. It’s just a bonus when they actually produce working products, as nearly all of our challenges did. Many of them still need additional work, but in the meantime local seeds are being saved and swapped, FCC data is being scraped to use for prison phone regulation advocacy, and tree location suggestions are being mapped to improve the local tree canopy.

Encouraging diverse participation

Hack For Western Mass flowchartFormer Seattle CTO Bill Schrier claims “very few ‘normal’ citizens are interested in [hackathons].  Many of them don’t have the skills or interest to spend a lot of time loading thousands of rows of data into a spreadsheet or some statistics program and crunching the data.”

“Normal” almost sounds like an insult in this case. Maybe “normal” citizens aren’t getting involved because many hackathons aren’t accessible and welcoming. Our organizers group knew we wanted our hackathon to be inclusive. In our media outreach, we made it clear that anyone interested in community building and civic change was welcome. I designed a flowchart for people to help determine if they should attend — and almost all paths led to yes. The only requirements were believing that Western Mass could be improved, and being able to work well with others.

Becky wrote a blog post titled “Do I have to be a programmer?” to give an overview of the many roles for people to play, from documenting and writing about projects, to project management, to simply helping brainstorm ideas.

But we knew simply inviting people to come might not be enough — we had to go the extra mile to make the event truly accessible. We adopted a code of conduct to help ensure the event was a safe space and make it clear that harassment of any kind wouldn’t be tolerated. In our opening remarks for the hackathon, we encouraged everyone to be considerate, respectful, and collaborative. I also gave a brief overview of hackathon tips, from making sure teams kicked off with everyone introducing themselves and talking about their skills and interests (even though it may seem like an obvious thing to do), to creative brainstorming strategies.

Families and food

In order to make sure that everyone who wanted to come could, we made an effort to make the event family friendly. A local volunteer from community center Owl & Raven generously offered to supervise a kids space, which enabled the attendance of several parents who wouldn’t have been able to attend otherwise. The kids had their own mini-hackathon, programming with Scratch, playing Minecraft, learning how to juggle, and making a stop-motion animation celebrating the hackathon.

We discussed prizes as an incentive to participate, but decided not to offer cash because we wanted the focus to be on collaboration, not competition. We also didn’t want people to feel pressured to come up with a completely original idea, and be open to reusing and adapting apps that already existed. Our fantastic turnout — 100 people! — showed that the only incentive people needed to participate was the promise of meaningful work. And it probably didn’t hurt that we rewarded them with delicious, healthy, local food.

Breakfast at Hack for Western MassSometimes we joke about the tofu-loving-crunchy-Portlandia culture of Western Mass. But truthfully, many people appreciated the lack of pizza — thanks to our generous sponsors we were able to provide vegan and gluten free options for every meal, including sushi, burrito bowls, and a variety of healthy breakfast foods. Thanks to CommunicateHealth, we also had a healthy snack table stocked all weekend with pistachios, blueberries, bananas, almonds, and lots of fancy granola bars.

The future of Hack for Western Mass

While we may have had a more diverse mix of people and skills than a typical hackathon, I think we can do even better. I would love to see more women and more socio-economic diversity at future hackathons. How do we make that happen? Perhaps hosting events in locations that are easier for people to access would help (Holyoke, etc.), as well as providing more education and training for populations who aren’t typically in the tech field. I’m open to ideas.

I know sustainability is currently one of the biggest challenges for civic hackathons. We’ve had one major meetup since the hackathon ended to showcase project progress, and it seems like there’s still momentum. But how do we keep it up, and provide continuing support to projects? Should we start a weekly hack night like Chicago? Should we become a Code for America Brigade? No matter what happens next in Western Mass, I have a feeling we’re just getting started.

I’ll end with a few testimonials we received after the event:

“Personally, I feel like I just spent the day at NASA, seeing the tremendous set of skills people here in Western MA have gathered in one room!”

“The coolest thing about #HFCWesternMA is probably the little kids doing crazy things on the computers. Family friendly hackathon for sure!”

“The Hack for Western Mass event has been a tremendous catalyst in getting to reach our goal… It’s been phenomenal to see them put together in a day and a half what would have taken me many, many months, if I’d ever been successful at all.”

“When I signed up for Hack for Western Mass, I was not entirely sure if I would be useful here… It felt great to get [social media accounts] set up so that the rest of the team could focus on building the site and the word can start getting out about this great new resource. This has been an inspirational weekend, great job to the Hack for Western Mass organizers and I’ll be back next year!”


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