Introducing Hack to Act

Hack to Act is a new kind of benefit.  Its goal is to create a scalable event structure that helps connect developers with problems.  The inspiration come from several discussions I had with friends in the non-profit space who had really simple needs like building a website, tools to get in touch with a community, and more.  These tasks may be as basic as setting up a Drupal site, hacking together something in Google App Engine, or generally the kinds of things a good geek can tackle in a weekend.  In addition, a friend of mine participates in the 48-hour film festival, and it really made me think about what a powerful catalyst a fixed window of time can be.  Imagine what kinds of problems we could solve if we put a great deal of structure around how we go about solving them?  I know a lot of people who come from coding backgrounds who would happily give up time to contribute, but there isn’t a way to connect them with the causes that need their help.  That is where we come in.

It was the realization of the disconnect between those that can help and those that need it combined with the power of trying to effect change in a short amount of time that inspired me to create this organization.  Think of it as a weekend-long hackathon for good.  Essentially, the premise is that the group facilitates defining a problem space in advance that is a small enough chunk to start tackling in a weekend.  Then, the people are split into teams and given the chance to create their vision of how the problem should be solved. At the end of the weekend, everyone presents their project and progress.  The sites will then be open-sourced so that the larger community can contribute to the development.  The key is to tackle solvable problems that will make a real difference.

I think that traditional means of solving problems on the web have been approached with a top-down mentality.  Other folks have tried to help connect those who care about something with the means to contribute, but the scale of those problems often makes them unaccessible and abstract to the person looking to make a difference.  I believe that we need to use the web to solve these problems from the bottom-up.  I’d rather help people find a local community center that is making sandwiches than give someone a button that says “help fight homelessness”.  We need to make social action tangible and relevant in a way that directly relates to the people we are appealing to for help.

Hack to Act is built to work in concert with this philosophy, and we are creating a framework of web tools to facilitate these events.  Our mission is to make problem solving scalable and as hyper-local as the problem space needs to be.  These events can happen at any appropriate level, and we are setting up our infrastructure in a way that anyone with a need can easily spin up their own instance of a Hack to Act while still staying true to the mission.

We still have a great deal of work to do to get the organization up and running, but have fantastic people from both the non-profit and tech spaces helping make this intersection happen.  This blog will be the place to find out the latest information on what we are doing, and what you can do to help.  If you are interested in contributing, you can find my contact info on the “About” page.  We are working hard to get the logistics of setting up a new non-profit taken care of, building the technological infrastructure we need, planning our longer-term roadmap, and working on our short-term goals to organize our first event.  We have a real opportunity to work together to create a new way of solving problems, and I’m excited to help launch this project.