Charity Hack 09

London 19-20th September

The Winners!

Sep 24

Posted by Anthony in News | 2 Comments

Over the weekend of the 19th and 20th of September 2009, over 100 developers gathered at the PayPal offices in Richmond to take part in the first ever Charity Hack event. At the end of the 24 hours, the applications varied from mobile uses to online games.

It was a glimpse into how these new applications could be used by developers to make payment and donation giving even easier for the consumer.

The big winners were:

  • Silliest hack – comparetheduck.co.uk which allowed you to compare rubber ducks and build your own top trumps cards. It was suggested that a charity could use the system with a more appropriate theme.
  • Breast Cancer Campaign challenge – Pinkify. This facebook application allows you to select a friends photo and make them “wear it pink”. This ap has a huge potential to go viral as well getting the “wear it pink” message over to the facebook generation. The winners included Cristiano Betta and Melinda Seckington.
  • Best Mobile hack – GetGiving was based on allowing you to make a spontaneous donation to charity on seeing a poster or paper/tube advert. This allowed you to either use an iphone ap/ text message or a mobile website. The winning team included Anshu Nagar (@codngintellgnce), Johanna Kollmann, Mark Wenger, Iman Samizadeh and Dave Erasmus.
  • Best Social Media based hack- Sponsor Me. This facebook application allows you to set up a cause and donate the proceeds directly to a charity via Missionfish and PayPal. This app allows you to pick a charity and therefore has great potential on the world biggest social network. The winning team included Wakari founder, Mat Clayton.
  • The winning hack was CharityFrag by a team of 5 including Tim Nash, Dom Hodgson, Kevin Prince, Leeky and Tom Morris. This amazing application connected an opensource first person shooter game up with PayPal’s adaptive payments. Judges picked this one not only as it used very innovative technologies, but it addressed the issue of engaging a younger generation in the donation process.

Worldeka Challenge

Sep 19

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Worldeka is a collaborative platform for social change. Meaning one world in Sanskrit Worldeka is a targeted social network for charities, NGOs, activists and policy makers. The aim is to help these organizations connect, share resources, communicate with their members and create cross border partnerships. The site also offers project management tools and collaborative features enabling charities to work together on specific projects, as well as combine intelligence and resources to aid humanitarian and disaster relief.

Individuals using Worldeka can join and support their favourite charities, mentor smaller charities, create personal projects and events and invite like-minded individuals and charities to take part. Post their own personal media as well as use Worldeka’s central knowledge bank, create polls and petitions and connect with charities and individuals who share their same goals and passions.

Worldeka went live on the 8th June and we have already had a great response from both charities and individuals but we have had somewhat of a soft launch with elements of the site needing slight improvements, such as enhancements to the collaborative functionalities available to charities and the creation of divisional offices so you can easily drill down from parent charities eg. Amnesty International to Amnesty UK, Amnesty France etc. These final tweaks are nearly completed and we will be rolling out the next phase of our launch inviting en-masse charities and individuals from all over the world to be a part of our online revolution.

The main challenge is not getting the charities on board as there are already plenty of channels available for us to reach them, rather the issue is to create a powerful and dynamic crowd of individual ‘activists’ and make them aware of the sites existence! Up to now its largely relied on word of mouth and we have had users join from over 100 countries – but we really need an application we can plug into existing networks to help amplify our message and create awareness.

Another project we have been looking to create is a mobile based like a second layer of Worldeka purely disseminating education, farming, healthcare and environmental information to the developing world using WAP and cut down web technologies which will pass easily through existing P2P networks across Africa for instance. (no social network and little media)

Another possibility could be a plugin for the actual site, like a googlemap mashup displaying and connecting people based on their current locations and thematic interests.

www.worldeka.com

What To Bring To Charity Hack

Sep 15

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We’ve gotten a few emails about what to bring this weekend so here’s a quick list.

  • A laptop, netbook or other computing device (please don’t bring your desktop… we don’t have the space)
  • A Sleeping bag (many of the attendees will be coding through the night but the occasional couple of hours sleep is permitted)
  • A Towel (Did we mention that we have showers!)
  • A victory speech (its always good to be prepared)

Usually its best to have an idea of what your working on before you arrive at the event but that’s not necessary at charity hack, we have plenty of charities that will be here on the day with lots of ideas of what you can hack.

The same with teams, you can either have a team already or join a team when the event starts (we will have a process to match people to teams)

Thanks for reading,

See you on Saturday!

Charity Developer Challenge : Breast Cancer Campaign

Sep 10

Posted by Anthony in Charities | 2 Comments

Brest Cancer Campaign have set a challenge for our attendees, would you like to know more :

Breast Cancer Campaign is looking for ways to increase awareness and generate support of our national fundraising event, wear it pink, across the UK and Ireland. Through the use of social media and PayPal we hope to engage our supporters whilst providing an alternative, easier means to donate to the charity throughout October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month (BCAM).

As wear it pink is all about having fun whilst raising money for breast cancer research (people dye their hair pink/where pink costumes/hold pink events), we want something which social media users can use in order to add a bit of wear it pink-style fun to their social media profile too.

The Challenge – Pink Your Profile!

We would like you to develop a functional application that enables social media users to turn their profile photo/avatar pink for the month of October in support of our wear it pink event.

Users who add the application should be able to:

  • Turn their profile photo/avatar pink
  • Make a donation to Breast Cancer Campaign through PayPal
  • Register to take part in wear it pink (this should be optional as some people may have already signed up)
  • Invite their friends on Facebook to also add the application

The aim is to provide a fun application which promotes wear it pink and allows other users to easily add the application to their pages.

About wear it pink

This year, we are asking you to wear it pink for the 125 women who are diagnosed with breast cancer every day in the UK. Campaign needs your help to continue funding research into this disease. By wearing an item of pink on Friday 30 October and donating £2 you can help us beat breast cancer.

The theme this year is ‘It’s time to wear it pink. It’s time to beat breast cancer’. Visit the wear it pink website at www.wearitpink.co.uk

About Breast Cancer Campaign

Breast Cancer Campaign’s mission is to beat breast cancer by funding innovative world-class research to understand how breast cancer develops, leading to improved diagnosis, treatment, prevention and cure.

www.breastcancercampaign.org

wear it pink® is a registered trademark.

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And Now For The Prizes…

Sep 2

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We have managed to secure 3 prizes for the charity hack weekend and they will be as follows

Prize for best Web application:

1 Economy flight to San Francisco (must stay 1 Saturday) including 1 ticket for PayPal Innovate 09  with 3 nights stay at the conference hotels in central San Francisco read about PayPal innovate here https://www.paypal-communications.com/innovate2009/

Prize for best Mobile Application:

The Slingbox™ PRO allows you to watch and control up to four video sources—including your HD content (when used with HD Connect)—from anywhere in the world on your laptop or cell phone. That means you can virtually take your entire home theatre with you, including your DVR, digital cable, satellite receiver, and DVD player. With the Slingbox PRO, you’ll be at home wherever you roam.

Prize for best Social Media application:

Rovio Mobile Webcam is the groundbreaking new Wi-Fi enabled mobile webcam that lets you view and interact with its environment through streaming video and audio, wherever you are! With Rovio, you will always be just a click away from the people and places that are important to you

We will also have a series of silly prizes for “Silliest Hack” and other random things we decide on the day.

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A Message From Bright One

Sep 2

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Bright One Logo

“Bright One are looking to develop a widget that tracks and displays the professional development and activity of its volunteers. The sample areas that they would develop in include loyalty, volunteer of the month, client satisfaction, creativity, leadership, organisation – though these may be added to or changed over time. This widget be as simple as a badge that sits on people’s preferred sites, such as Facebook or personal blogs, or a manually-updated ’scout badge’ that rewards volunteers with badges every time they complete certain actions. The only guidelines are that it needs to have a simple interface, be manually updated by Bright One volunteers, and be able to be inserted onto various sites, social networks and blogs. The only other limits are your imagination!”

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Calling All Hackers!

Aug 31

Posted by Anthony in News | 1 Comment

There is less than a month until Charity Hack day, it’s time to start thinking about teams, a project and well, getting down here.

We just want to make something clear, although we have lots of API goodness available for you to use on the day and we have some charitable sponsors, we are not forcing the use of these, if you have a good idea that will help any charity then that’s good enough for us!

Almost half of our tickets have gone and we would really like a full house so… why not tweet about it? or shout about it on your blog?

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Charity Hack Wiki

Aug 26

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The Charity Hack Wiki is now online. Feel free to contribute application ideas, suggested APIs, your bio and anything else you feel is relevant to the event.  Looking forward to seeing you all on the 19th September!

Dates and Venue Announced!

Aug 1

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Charity Hack Weekend brings together charities and developers to revolutionise the collection of donations. Join us 19-20 September 2009 and be part of this extraordinary event. We’re looking for developers to come up with new and innovative ways of helping charities promote their causes and garner support from the community. The weekend will be hosted by PayPal at their Richmond, London, UK offices.  We’re looking for developers, designers and technical people actively involved in the running of charities.