Every year, thousands of hackathons take place across the United States – I happened to organize one this past June with Code for San Francisco for National Day of Civic Hacking – SF 2015. We had 300+ attendees working on 22 different projects; the experience taught me a volumes about the needs of civic hackers. It also introduced me to Microsoft’s efforts to provide resources to the civic tech community. A couple of months later, I joined Microsoft’s Technology and Civic Engagement team as a Civic Innovation Fellow.
As a Fellow, I have helped build ‘Hackathon in a Box’ – a way for civic tech developers to have free Azure credits to experiment with new ideas: host a website or mobile app, write new code on a virtual machine, or take advantage of machine learning. After seeing the challenges teams face at civic tech hackathons first-hand, I’ve been able to tackle one major issue- the amount of time developers and project teams spend setting up their tools.
Hackathons already have a limited window for each team to work within, and it is up to the developer to create a working proof of concept within the time restriction. It would be great to minimize the time it takes for developers to get started and instead use their precious time to work on their solution. ‘Hackathon in a Box’ is an opportunity to help developers use their time more efficiently, meaning maximizing their build time and minimizing set-up.
To make sure ‘Hackathon in a Box’ would actually help developers solve the above challenge, I needed to answer key questions. Who are these civic tech developers? What software do they use? Why do they prefer one tool to another? What factors determine their willingness to try something new? To test my assumptions about what would be of help to civic tech developers, I created a short survey to collect data. With the help of friends and colleagues, we received feedback from 65+ developers who volunteer with Code for America’s brigades across the country.
I am now using the feedback to scope out requirements for ‘Hackathon in a Box’. By the end of my fellowship, I’ll have written instructions so developers can easily access Microsoft tools, user personas, a list of recommended tools, and documentation on the needs specific to civic tech hackathons. Overall, this forms a knowledge base from which my colleagues can build new products to meet the needs of this particular set of developers.
The Technology and Civic Engagement group is already focused on helping the civic tech community use and maximize Microsoft resources. What excites me about ‘Hackathon in a Box’ is that it will further support a specific community of people I care deeply about – civic technologists and the volunteers that attend civic tech hackathons.
Special thanks to Scott Mauvais, Kenny Spade, Andrew Hyder, Grayson Wright, and Trent Oswald.
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Katherine is a Civic Innovation Fellow at Microsoft with Technology and Civic Engagement. She lives in Oakland and volunteers with Code for San Francisco. Originally trained in the fine arts, Katherine found her way into museums and civic tech by following her interest to help her community.
