Participating in the iPhone Hackathon for Charity this past weekend was quite the experience. We got to work with some highly motivated and talented people from around Halifax, towards a common goal of raising money for charity by hacking out (as Dale notes, hack is to come up with a quick and clever solution to a problem) as many iPhone Apps as we could over a weekend. Plus, we got to design the brand and do a bit of ad and PR work leading up to the weekend. We ended up with a great start on three apps:
Meet Me Here: A quick way to invite people to a meet-up on your iPhone
Civic Snitch: A front-end app that will submit to FixMyStreet Canada.
Post Card: To be officially named, this app lets you style a postcard with a picture and send it to contacts.
Will Lechance, Dale Zak, and The Hub Halifax all have great posts about the weekend as well, so check them out. It was interesting how the ideas and scope evolved over the first day. The idea Nick and I spent most of our time with was CivicSnitch, which in the end doesn’t really lend itself to a charity directly, and from a marketing perspective isn’t an ideal candidate for a paid iPhone app. However, the nature of the app is to help point out dangers, environmental concerns, or otherwise “broken” things in your community (pot holes, constant overflowing garbage, poor lighting) and report to who’s responsible in your local municipality via the already-existing website (Will actually pointed this site out as the original idea started to drift towards the same concept, so we ran with it). The funny thing is, I went into this thinking we have to keep focus on making marketable apps that we can sell for charity. But, in the end we’ll have something that more-so aligns itself with the initiatives of say, the Ecology Action Centre here in Halifax, maybe more specifically pertaining to Built Environment, which is still community-focused and pretty cool.
Another big shout to all our sponsors for helping make this happen and providing us with some awesome food from Local Source sponsored by InNOVAcorp, Nova Scotia Economic & Rural Development and Huminah Huminah, and Splice provided snacks. The Coast was generous in giving us Web and print ads to spread the word. Cool shirts designed by Nick and paid for by our friend Bill at MindSea. Be Massage was there giving everyone massage breaks and we even had DJ Rich+NESS spinning some tunes to keep us going. And of course The Hub for the awesome workspace and Dale for organizing the event.
It’s pretty neat when everyone comes together in different ways to work together towards one goal. It was great to be involved and we look forward to the next steps, so stay tuned for updates.
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