El Concilio of San Mateo County
El concilio is committed to increasing employment, education and access to quality of life services for underserved communities in San Mateo County.
Improve the website of El Concilio and information about services it provides. Incorporate potential donor site, links to services, resources and health education pieces. The website is www.el-concilio.com
Sustainable Silicon Valley - Collaboration Funnel
Sustainable Silicon Valley (SSV) is an organization that has partnerships with businesses, governments, and non-governmental organizations that are identifying and addressing environmental and resource challenges in Silicon Valley through education and collaboration. Based on Santa Clara, SSV offers a series of workshops and conferences that connect industry leaders, and operates an online social network called EcoCloud to support the organization's programs, as well as supporting the research projects of our academic partners.
The Collaboration Funnel is a new module within EcoCloud, and is a combination of challenge-based crowdsourcing and team-based collaboration, applied to selecting winning environmental solutions from a community. EcoCloud has just completed a challenge to gather solutions for Planetary Sustainability with over 100 entries from collaborators ranging from industry leaders to students. In this project we will build a crowdsourcing capability to select winning solutions from these entries, and extend the approach to build a platform for additional challenges, which we call “funnels”. Each funnel has a reward at the end, and teams rate solutions which survive through the funnel. A team gains credibility points when they select a solution which proves to be a winner.
"We have a data model for solutions, challenges, and contributors, along with an operational system for gathering solutions, but no automated evaluation/selection management system. We will be starting a new application in this project, but extracting models and code from SSV’s EcoCloud code base where relevant.
We will provide background and domain knowledge to the effort, as well as technical guidance from SSV’s CTO and EcoCloud team members. We will set up source code repositories for the project team, using Git or Mercurial as requested by team members. We already have a hosting site created, with an app server and database installed.
"There will be two main tracks of design and development. The back-end developers should be familiar with web application tools such as Grails, Rails, or CodeIgniter, as well as database technology such as MySQL. The front-end developers will work with their choice of front-end technology, but we expect to focus on jQuery, CSS/HTML, and Backbone.js. Math skills and algorithm skills for modeling and decision analysis will be important for both teams.
This is an excellent opportunity to learn and apply data modeling skills or front-end design skills in a setting that enables research efforts to add value in our community. SSV will be using the results of this work to help select winning solutions in its Planetary Sustainability challenge, which will be presented in May of this year.
Acuity - Voice capture and delivery
We are a small group of researchers tracking human aging by studying speech. Using our research, we hope to develop an application for the rapid assessment and differentiation of the early stages of neurological and psychiatric diseases of aging.
We are taking our first step with this hackathon. We aim to develop an app within 24 hours that can capture and relay verbal information from a smart phone or tablet to a database for analysis and interpretation. To accomplish this, we will develop a simple interface that will display words on a screen and record the user's voice reading those words. We will then send that audio data to the database and verify its receipt.
We will use UI Design, mobile app development, understanding of client-server programming