So many people came out to Hackathon 2011 to participate, and we gathered some of what they had to say about their projects here.
Grameen America
Grameen America is a microfinance organization that provides loans to low-income entrepreneurs across the United States.
Our team was commissioned to develop a website to facilitate the involvement of university students in Grameen's mission.
We implemented the site using the Joomla content management system, and we successfully implemented almost all of the features requested in the project specification.
Specifically, the site provides organization history and reference material, media kits and discussion forums for university group collaboration, donor management and data tracking. In addition, we structure the site in such a way that it's content will be easily maintainable by Grameen administrators moving forward.
Mandela Rhodes Foundation
Built a web interface through which Mandela Rhodes Foundation may upload donation data, analyze it using various charts and tables, and find potential donors.
Gumball Capital
Our goal was to design and create a mobile website for Gumball Capital for their Challenge participants to utilize while they're out working on the challenge. We discussed what components of the full website were necessary to have a counterpart in the mobile site and we designed several prototypes of the mobile site pages. We decided to go with a very facebook-app similar design to facilitate user navigation between profiles, leaderboards, news feeds, and resources. We made several screen templates in photoshop for the different pages we'd have. We also designed our mobile html around JQuery mobile, so we have an intuitive, mobile-friendly expand feature in all of our pages to prevent the user as much as possible from having to navigate to new pages, which can be slow on mobile phones. At the end of Hackathon, we had photoshop templates for all of the mobile pages, along with nearly 2 of the major pages completely, functionally coded in html. Gumball Capital's going to use our photoshop templates and already completed pages to quickly piece together the remaining main pages and then they'll work to get the mobile site properly connected to their databases so they can release the mobile site to challenge participants.
Buck Institute
For our project, we worked on targeting genes that could be involved in aging. To accomplish this, we queried bioinformatic data to come up with a ranking based on a combination of different metrics. Given a set of genes known to be involved in aging and the properties known to be associated with each gene, we tried to find a ranking of prospective genes that could be involved in aging.
Another group fixed some code that gets annotations of genes based on their descriptions and made it interact with gene databases. They also wrote a program that gets descriptions of genes from the NCBI gene database website and will integrate this into the overall system.
ASAP Africa
We built an event system on top of ASAP Africa's current website as part of ASAP's new Light the Way campaign, an initiative to organize ASAP events across the country. Our system serves as a central location for this campaign as well as resource for sharing information about these events. Previously, the ASAP website was purely static before but with the events system we have introduced admin account features and dynamic content. For event coordinators, we added features so that they can login and manage all the events. Event coordinators can edit any event, delete an event, create a new event, add new users, and add stories to events. Event coordinators can also paste embed code from a Picassa album and embed it into an event page. From the Light the Way landing page, people can register an event, browse current events, and go to an event's own page. From an event's page you can view the event's pictures. The events page lists several events as well as randomly selecting one event to feature. There is a search box on the right to search for events. People register an event through a Google form. Event coordinators can check this Google form and add events through the event coordinators admin site.
We also explored a webstore and made some progress, but decided to concentrate on the event system to make it more beneficial.
SEE College Prep
Our group worked on the website for SEE College Prep. We created a database with which they can keep track of their students and their students' test scores. Teachers, students, and admins can log in and compare test scores, upload surveys, and track progress. We also redesigned their website into what we hope is a more visually appealing and user-friendly format.
AIDS Housing Alliance
We created an iPhone application that sells coffee beans. There were eight varieties of beans and they were sold in 1 and 5 pound units. We created icons and designed a user interface. We created an XML database for prices and a PHP interface to the database.
Open Data Kit
ODKBuild is a web application for building forms used for data collection around the world. We added a capability for administrators to log in as other users, which will aid in maintenance and troubleshooting. We also added a basic set of analytics tools that show how many and what kinds of forms are being created. Finally, we built the beginnings of a unit testing suite, which will help the code's stability as it grows larger.
Project Feedback
We worked on developing an awesome web site for "Project Feedback", an offshoot from SPOON, the Stanford Project for Hunger. The website helps connect extra leftovers from college cafeterias with non-profit organizations that donate the food to people that need it.
SIRUM
Sirum is a non-profit organization that matches clinics in need of medicine with excess supply from pharmaceutical companies. It’s an online exchange system that works to prevent billions of dollars in medicine going to waste by coordinating donations and saving time for all parties involved.
Sirum came to us for help with their donation/transaction processing system. We were asked to create a billings grid that stored cost information and percentages for different types of organizations, mapped to different kinds of billable features. This grid would allow Sirum to easily calculate how much a party’s total bill would be, and allow for more synchronization. We were also asked to build a cron job scheduler for automation and to add some Javascript functionality for system automation.
Working on this project was great—Sirum already had a pretty large and sophisticated code base up, so we ran the site locally on our own servers and implemented our changes. It was a learning experience for all of us, and it was cool knowing that everything we built was going to be put to very good use. Adam Kircher of Sirum was a great help for us; he made sure he was constantly available to help us out, and even spent a good part of Saturday sitting with us as we set up.
JGC
We developed a new framework and look for the site based on the identified needs of the various groups of expected users. We tried to make the website look more modern and have a logical flow that highlights the work that JGC accomplishes. We also made a few suggestions as to furthering JGC's web presence.
Stanford Habitat for Humanity
We developed and implemented a new website that has the additional functionality of an embedded calendar that is easy to update, in-site sign-up, and updated newest events. We overhauled the site entirely, giving it a new framework as well as a new look.