#code for good

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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