The Syracuse Tech Garden hosted a 24-hour civic hackathon and food and clothing drive this weekend to fight hunger and homelessness.

The Hack Hunger and Homelessness hackathon was also a partner in a virtual hackathon sponsored by AT&T as a part of its Central New York Civic App Challenge, which started Sept. 11 and will end Nov. 11. At this hackathon and others, students and community members attempted to brainstorm and code an app to help fight hunger and homelessness in 24 hours.

The winning team received $1,000 from the Tech Garden to continue to develop its project. The project could also win $7,500 if submitted to AT&T. The winner of the hackathon was Txt2Eat, a mobile app that sends information to a cell phone about food you can eat now if you are hungry, or when you can pick up food if you’re a food pantry or shelter.

The hackathon also featured a panel of community members who work to fight or raise awareness about homelessness and hunger. Some of the panelists had actually experienced homelessness and were hoping to change the assumptions about it.

Tom Hart, a web application developer at Terakeet, a web development company, and a participant in previous Tech Garden hackathons, helped to organize this weekend’s hackathon. This was Hart’s fourth hackathon. Hart, who was homeless from 2002–05, came specifically hoping to change the perception of homelessness and who it can affect.

“This is about raising awareness as well as finding solutions. The experience of being homeless is incredibly misunderstood. I was young, I came from a good home, I was well educated and went to a good school,” Hart said. “Up to that point, nothing would lead you to believe that I could end up in that situation. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody.”

Marcene Sonneborn, a professor in Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and small business innovation research specialist for the Central New York Technology Development Organization, had participated in hackathons before but had never pitched an idea until this weekend.

“I decided this time I wanted to pitch because I would like to think about how can we become more aware of what’s going on,” she said. “Homeless people have histories and really interesting stories behind them.”

The hackathon also attracted a number of students, programmers and non-programmers alike. Irfan Uraizee, a senior broadcast and digital journalism major at SU, came for his first hackathon to try and make a difference in the community.

“I thought to myself how can I apply my skills to something that would improve the Syracuse area?” he said. “I don’t know what to expect, but I’m excited to work with so many talented hackers and journalists to see what we can come up with to alleviate homelessness and poverty in our area.”

Tony Kershaw, the innovation specialist for Centerstate CEO at the Tech Garden and an organizer of the hackathon, said he hoped that this hackathon would be a first step in learning how to leverage technology to target specific community problems to create lasting impact.

“We want to build solutions that have lasting impact, not just cool technology that does stuff. We want things that people value,” Kershaw said. “This is not about us, it’s about us giving back and leveraging what we know how to do to benefit the community.”

Sixty people registered for this hackathon, but the turnout was not as important as creating a dialogue and raising awareness for everyone involved, he said.

Said Kershaw: “We set reasonable expectations for the turnout and that’s totally fine. But folks are talking about what this could be in the future and it has really facilitated new connections and relationships outside of the event. Regardless of the turnout, stuff is happening.”

Published on November 10, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Jake: acappucc@syr.edu