Charity-IT

Quick note, nothing to do with the rest of the post

Some of you may know that I had to leave the flat I was in last Saturday (28th of February). Even if it has been a loooong time now since I am looking for a new accommodation, I did not manage to find anything yet. Thanks to my awesome manager who proposed to host me in her flat, I am now back in Johnsonville for some time. Thanks to one of my colleague who helped me Saturday morning, moving all my stuff has not been such a pain.

Now that you are all reassured about my condition, I can talk about what I have done during the last week-end, from the 27th of February to the 1st of March.

Hackathon for good

I participated to an hackathon called Charity-IT. Hackathons are events where people with different skills are brought together in a collaborative environment to solve problem in a short period of time. Organizers usually provide food, drinks, comfortable working place, help and advices.

As the name suggests, Charity-IT specifically regroups some charity organizations who need IT advices and help, and IT professionals who want to share their knowledge and invest some of their time for a good cause.

Friday evening

It began Friday around 6 pm. At first, we heard a quick introduction of the event, a presentation of the sponsors which made it possible and of our host, sharing its office for the week-end. I am not usually a huge fan of branding based operations, but in our case, I think companies who dedicated resources to allow persons to work for charity deserves our attention. Thanks to Servcorp, Snapper and Psoda for their support.

The charities

After briefly introduced themselves and their purpose, each of the four charity presented the problem(s) they identified and need to be solved to facilitate and improve their actions.

Big Brothers Big Sisters: New Zealand's branch of the world wide organization providing a youth mentoring programme. They were looking for two things : a system to allow them to keep contact with the kids and their mentor who benefited from the program and a refresh of their website, with the wish of keeping the old content.
Able Pet Care: Provides quality pet care services done by persons with a disability, allowing them to have a job and express their skills. They wanted help and advice for their process and the tools they use, as well as a website to present their organization.
Kiwi Community Assistance: Food and clothes donations for poor people. KCA work with a lot of providers and partners, for example using free space left in some companies' trucks to avoid transportations costs. They needed a refresh of their website, move it to their own server and some tidying on their Facebook page.
Nature Through The Arts: Connect people together and with nature through creative project. They wanted a website and a presence on social media.

Engagement

After the presentations, we had thirty minutes to chose a charity we would be working for the rest of the week-end. At this point, I was interested to work for three of them, and discussing more precisely about their expectations, exchanging thoughts and ideas with others participants helped everyone to make their choice.

I chose to work for Kiwi Community Assistance because I liked their actions and I thought that is where my skills would be the most useful. Once the teams formed, we began trying to figure out which technologies and tools we would be using to solve the charity's problem. We decided quickly hearing each team members' experiences and knowledge. At this point, we were looking forward to start on Saturday's morning.

Saturday

There is not so much to talk about Saturday: we worked, complained about the technologies and the tools we chose, thought, discussed, planned our actions, failed, succeed. In short, we got stuff done.

At midday, each charity had to present what has been done in their respective project so far. At this stage, most of us did not have working solutions for the biggest problems yet, but we could already felt how much value our few hours of work brought to their jobs.

The day passed, and even if I was super tired Saturday evening, I was really motivated in doing some research about a technology it would have been cool to use the next day. I miserably failed to get something working and finally went to bed after three hours for almost nothing.

Sunday

Again, we worked almost all day. One important thing about this hackathon is that we have to deliver something finished: no proof of concept, nor to-do left, neither a well marketed presentation of « what our product would be like ». People working in charities needs to have something they can use, and they need to know of to use it.

The hackathon ended around 5 pm. We manage to have the new website working with almost all requirements completed and to refresh the KCA's facebook page.

Results

We were not the only team which was working hard: each of us presented their week-end efforts' results, and some of them are really stunning considering what they were coming from.

Nature Through Arts has now a complete web presence. They build a new website, and created social media accounts. They also took time to teach to the charity representative how to create and manage content through this tools so they are now totally autonomous.
Able Pet Care has a new timesheet system for their employees as well as a new website.
Big Brothers Big Sisters: because of the amount of work required to migrate their old content to a new platform, some people of their team are still investing their personal time to complete this task (more than a hundred pages). But they had their tool to keep in touch with the former youth and mentors in less than half a day!
Kiwi Community Assistance: manage to get a functional « beta » website, but still require a bit of work to be safely deployed. One of their volunteer has some web server management skills and usually take care of maintenance and minor evolutions.

Conclusion

I always loved hackathon: it is a great environment to use and improve skills by doing something intending to be used. Furthermore, the will of having something that charities can use drove most of our work.

There are different way to considerate how much value has been created during this two days. People invested their time, shared their knowledge and use their skills to answer organisations problems. This is not really different of what we do at work, except that money is a good that charities can not massively invest in their business development.

It reminds me the importance of choosing who and what for we want to spend our energy and our so precious time. Thanks to all of those who gave us the privilege to do so.