Community Roundup: Hackathons Empowering Safety, Security, and Diversity
A Comfortable and Safe Environment for Female Hackers at WiCHacks
It always takes a lot of energy to put together a hackathon, but WiCHacks organizer Sneha Vaswani was driven by her mission. “Women in technology are important,” Vaswani explained. “Hackathons are often male dominated and it’s important to create a comfortable and safe environment for female hackers.”
Creating such an environment was the goal of Vaswani and her co-organizers at WiCHacks, a hackathon for female-identifying high school and college students hosted by Women in Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology. And judging by their five years of success, Women in Computing seem to have cracked the code for a fun and supportive event.
At WicHacks 2018, a 24-hour event between February 10th and 11th, 125 participants got to enjoy raffles, innovative panels on topics like noise cancelling algorithms, and mentors from a wide range of companies — including beloved New England grocery chain Wegmans!
All the excitement helped inspire some truly incredible projects that echoed the spirit of the event, like Girls Who Hack, an educational website that uses a storytelling framework to help kids learn basic Linux terminal commands, which are essential for developing a deeper understanding of computer operations and cybersecurity.
One of the organizers’ other favorites was Go Home You’re Drunk, winner of sponsor Fidelity’s Best UI award. With a series of passcode-protected gateways and a soothing color scheme, this sympathetic app helps the user make (or not make!) communication decisions they won’t later regret.
With some great local media hype and another successful year on the books, Vaswani and WiCHacks proves that women in tech are ready to invent the future!
Changing the Numbers at T9Hacks
The numbers tell the story at 2018’s T9Hacks: over 135 hackers, 70% of whom were women and non-binary, while nearly 65% were first-timers. That’s a rousing success for the hackathon hosted by the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, whose express mission is to “create fun and creative environments where marginalized students — particularly women and non-binary students — can learn about computing and solve compelling problems.”
Over 24 hours between February 10th and 11th, those 135 hackers tackled a lot of compelling problems while laughing, learning, and competing for unique prizes like the “most creative use of the color purple.”
Many of the projects solved very practical problems, like PeekPeak, a Dragonboard-powered Android app that helps users save money and grid strain by monitoring their energy use and cutting down energy during “peak power time.” Other practical solutions aimed more toward human well-being, like Happy Ivy, a task reminder app for people with bipolar disorder that rewards task completion with sweet virtual plant growth.
For T9Hacks, innovation in utility comes with innovation in representation. As they explain on their DevPost page, “Women occupy only 26% of IT positions and 18% of engineering majors in universities, and we want to help raise those numbers.”
T9Hacks will be back in the Fall, and we can’t wait to see what this inventive and equality-focused hackathon will cook up next!
36 Hours in the Swamp at SwampHacks
Immersion is the keyword at SwampHacks, a University of Florida hackathon organized for students by students. For four years, SwampHacks has been taking place over 36 hours — a longer-than-usual window that allows for truly deep dives.
Over the January 19th weekend, nearly 500 hackers gathered in the mild Gainesville winter to “collaborate on projects, mingle in activities, and network with sponsors,” as SwampHacks puts it. They came from all around the country, and they tried to eat spicy ramen in one bite.
They also worked together in teams to create mind-blowing projects like Swamp Spectrum, a game that combines fun and social good, helping parents identify autism in their children at early ages. A deceptively simple drawing game on the surface, Swamp Spectrum uses Android motion sensors to measure hand gestures, frequency, and swipe speed and compare them to clinical data that corresponds with autism.
Other cool hacks in the swamp included SwampBox, a P2P good rental app that uses face recognition for security. And no, you didn’t have to have Swamp in the name; witness 3Dsnap — a HoloLens and tablet driven app for saving visual data in “3D memories” — and dark forest, an online adventure game for teaching kids basic programming. (Well, maybe a dark forest is pretty close to a swamp).
With an impressive attendee count and the momentum of a great event, we can’t wait to come back to the swamp!
