Sustainable Silicon Valley - Mobile EcoCloud
Organization Description: Sustainable Silicon Valley (SSV) is a 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. After focusing on carbon emissions during 2006 through 2010, the organization began to focus on water and energy more recently. Based on Santa Clara, offers a series of workshops and conferences that connect industry leaders, and operates a online social network called EcoCloud to support the organization's programs.
Project Description: We wish to develop a mobile application that will allow users to utilize SSV's content and social network (EcoCloud) from anywhere. We are targeting the iPhone and Android platforms. The application will support:
* role-based content access, where roles include business user, environmental professional user, government worker
* case studies of success in areas such as recycled water, energy efficiency, and materials re-use
* marketplace of vendors and partners available to support environmental improvement projects
* if possible, access to project team information located on wiki sites used by our project team that is designing an industrial ecosystem for Mountain View
The application will look like a on-line newsletter containing user-specific content (much like a newsreader), supporting drilling down to related vendor information (much like an e-commerce site).
The application should also offer maps that allow the location of nearby environmental partners and projects.
Existing Work on Project: At this point there is no existing work on the mobile application itself, however, we have built and operated a web-based site of similar structure for the last year, and will use that as a source of content.
The project team will be provided with passwords of the web-based site to support access.
We have created some screen designs and mockups as images, including the content hierarchy.
Technical Skills for Hackers: The technical skills will be native iPhone application development, or if applicable Android API application development.
Developers should be familiar with how to use the iPhone foundation classes, the View classes, and the data management facilities.
It is not needed to have Apple developer memberships, as it is sufficient to develop to the simulator.
It is expected that developers will use the iOS 5 version of the operating system on iPhones and the Xcode 4 API.
Nanubhai Education Foundation - Sponsor a Child
Organization Description:
The Nanubhai Education Foundation is a fully volunteer-run organization dedicated to improving the quality of government school education in rural India, particularly with regards to English language and technology. Our belief is that in India's growing and globalizing economy, students without a functional knowledge of English and technology are at an extreme disadvantage when competing for jobs - as you are aware, India's government education can be abhorrent, particularly in the oft-forgotten rural and semi-rural areas. Nanubhai tackles this issue by sending motivated U.S.-trained educators to live and teach in India as Nanubhai Fellows; our Fellows teach not only students but train teachers as well to ensure that the change we create is sustainable and scalable.
Project Description: We would like Code the Change's computer scientists to work on creating a page of our website for our Sponsor a Child initiative, a page that can be used for donation and marketing purposes for our organization. A page where potential donors can "sponsor a child" by donating $50 to a particular student, picked from a roster of 40-50 students on the page with student pictures, names and brief bios.
Each student's picture and information can have a PayPal link for the tax deductible donation.
This project will be monumental in helping our organization collect funds from supporters, share our students' stories and raise awareness of education in India.
Existing Work on Project: We have an existing Wordpress website hosted through GoDaddy. We will need to provide access with log-in information for both.
Technical Skills for Hackers: I believe the website is HTML.
Topically - Discussion Platform
Organization Description: Topically aims to fulfill the gap left by the modern news media by democratizing the public policy debate in America. By allowing the public to submit questions and proposals that informed contributors will comment on, the public will have access to the information they want - not what the news media tells them they need. By creating interactive debate, individuals can engage
Project Description: Our design model is flexible, however the platform must allow for the submission of questions/proposals by any registered user, the ability to vote on those by any visitor of the site (registered or not), a display of those, and a unique page for every question/proposal where users can respond with answers and arguments of limited length and formatting. We envision having two tiers of usability. Allowing anyone to comment on submissions (i.e. Quora, Digg, Reddit) creates a risk of a high noise to signal ratio, so we have decided that our "official contributors" who have been selected in advance should have their responses visible to all, and the responses from the public are hidden. Users can opt in to see those entries.
Deliverables:
1 - A sign-in page where we could have users register prior to the launch.
2 - A platform where users can submit questions/proposals and vote/comment on them in real time. We can manually feed questions and proposals to our official contributors for their answers until the the platform for responses/comments is properly developed.
3 - A full-fledged comment and response system that allows us to control the length and content of the entries, allows visitors to vote on the entries, and allows the entries to be sorted by votes, time submitted, status of contributor, etc.
4 - Pages where official contributors can be profiled and the option for a registered user to "follow" and contributor such that they are identified when that contributor submits a response to a questions/proposal.
We are very open to suggestions.
Existing Work on Project: We have a domain registered through GoDaddy, hosting at HostGator, and a Wordpress blog currently on the site. We have a Git Hub set-up but there is no content there and so it's not necessary to use that. We can provide all necessary log-ins, passwords, etc.
Technical Skills for Hackers: Apart from having JS for the front-end, the back-end can be done numerous ways. We prefer RoR as this is what we've been studying in attempts to become proficient enough to do this ourselves - however if you're expertise is in something else (Python, node.js, etc.) we are not opposed to going a different route.
SIRUM - Tooltips
Organization Description: SIRUM changes the regulated medicine disposition process to permanently convert medicine destroyers into medicine donors, providing clinics with a consistent supply of medicine donations, rather than one-off donations. We use an online platform to automatically match the untapped surplus of medicine from nursing homes, wholesalers and specialty manufacturers with the needs of community clinics. Our peer-to-peer network encourages local donations and avoids costly overhead, donation delays, and liability associated with warehousing medicine.
Project Description: We use informational modal windows where tooltips would be more appropriate. I want to build off the jquery that we already use to make a stable, elegant tooltip that is easy to implement on many different pages on our site.
If there is time and/or interest, we have a secondary project of setting up a cron job to create a monthly billing statement to be emailed to our users. This would require PHP and some work with APIs.
Existing Work on Project: I have implemented basic tooltip functionality, but much refinement is needed before integrating it throughout the site.
Technical Skills for Hackers: Javascript, especially Jquery. Since many tutorial exist for his, it might be a good way for beginners to get a foot in the door of a new language.
Anjna Patient Education - Interactive Health Module
Organization Description: Anjna seeks to make three principal impacts through the development of our programs:
1. We increase the number of free clinics that provide health education programs as part of the clinics’
routine activities.
2. We increase the usage of appropriate technology such as iPads and SMS-based systems to improve the
delivery of health education at free clinics.
3. We ultimately promote healthy behavior changes that reduce the rates of chronic, preventable disease in
low-income communities.
These goals align with our driving vision to reduce the rates of chronic, preventable diseases nationwide and empower
patients to achieve stronger, healthier lives.
Project Description: The goal for the Interactive Module project is to create an educational session for patients waiting in free clinics. The module will consist of an audio recording which explains various chronic diseases and has animations or images that will pair along with the audio in order to explain. Also, there will be various multiple choice quizzes intermittently dispersed throughout the module to asses for learning and retention.
Existing Work on Project: There is no existing work.
Technical Skills for Hackers: Android Programming
Occupy Wall Street - Federated General Assembly
Organization Description: The Federated General Assembly (FGA) is an open source, distributed social platform designed to coordinate events and information, allowing people, groups, and organizations to share their activities, with an emphasis on meaning, value, and trust.
Project Description: The Federated General Assembly (FGA) is a next generation General Assembly site, capable of being rolled out and customized by other Occupations. Each instance will allow pushing and pulling of content between individuals, groups, and occupations in a meaningful way.
It is intended at this time to record and facilitate the on-the-ground operations of Occupation Working Groups, not to replace analog decision-making with online democracy. Many small cities lack IT infrastructure, and can find themselves limited by existing social media tools. The FGA aims to empower others while simultaneously re-invigorating and re-thinking our local — and by extension global — democracies.
Drupal has been selected as the platform of choice because of its large and distributed user base, its multilingual capabilities, its extendability, its nature as open source, and because of the overwhelming interest within the community for such an important project, combined with Drupal's civic-minded culture.
Additionally, the project will consider interoperability with other similar projects, such as those currently in place in Spain, and other initiatives as they arise. In this light, the FGA is highly concerned with standards for data interchange, authentication and data validation.
The FGA, conceptually, is inclusive of the NYCGA website, the news aggregator, and many other Services that are in various stages of development.
DELIVERABLES:
We're looking to make some connections, and rapid prototype some protocols that can help build our networks of trust.
We're also open to using our Directory information to build interesting front-end visualizations of occupations.
Existing Work on Project: We have a build system, deployment, and continuous integration tests in process, but not immediately ready for consumption.
http://directory.occupy.net is in development, with a Jan 30 release date. We have a data set of occupations (which may be interesting to play with).
We have a hosted on Pantheon git-controlled environment that we can use to stage new code, and build features on.
We have extensive documentation at http://projects.occupy.net/projects/fga/wiki/
Technical Skills for Hackers: php, MySQL, Drupal.
git
ability to experiment with any of the following technologies:
RDF, oAauth, OpenID, FOAF+SSL, XMPP, Atom/RSS, Salmon, PubSubHubbub
Interest in group collaboration tools.
Those interested in front-end, well, you know what you need.
Nilsby - Quora for families with special needs children
Organization Description: Nilsby will provide an online community where family members of special needs children can share information and emotional support with each other in a free and safe environment while also getting expert advice from thought leaders and service providers (doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc).
Project Description: We want to build an online community similar to Quora (which we view as the next generation of forums/bulletin boards given the unique features of their product). This will enable the offline community of thought leaders and families to easily share their experiences, ideas, and mutual support as they care for children with special needs.
What we want is the ability to ask questions, tag questions with topics (summer camp, inspiration, high school planning, etc), and the ability to follow users and topics. I have full mockups of what the site could look like. Quora is also a tremendous template. We also welcome creative input from designers and programmers alike.
Existing Work on Project: There is no existing work. This is a chance to have fun and build something from scratch!
Technical Skills for Hackers: There is no existing infrastructure, but programming in Ruby or Python is preferred (not mandatory).