Grameen America Inc. - $5 Challenge
Organization Description: Grameen America is a microfinance nonprofit that provides financial services to low-income entrepreneurs in the US. We create a community where any individual living below the poverty line can receive affordable financial products regardless of income, previous credit history, education, or business experience. Grameen America empowers individuals through microloans, financial education, savings, and credit establishment. The organization currently has 6 branches, serves over 8,500 individuals, and has disbursed over $35 MM.
Project Description: The desired project is to create a mobile website application hosted on our server through which we will run our annual $5 Challenge. The $5 Challenge spreads awareness about US poverty by simulating the financial burden of living on $5 a day. The $5 Challenge will be an annual event hosted by Grameen America to spread awareness and activate youths to create social change. The mobile website app brings the challenge to life as participants record their hour-by-hour experience through the site. Viral awareness through social media is the goal.
The site has 4 components: Activity Gallery, Budget Keeper, Personal Page & Rank
Activity Gallery contains all actions one may perform over the course of a day (i.e., shower, turn on lights, take transportation, charge phone, etc.). Each activity has a cost associated. When user performs activity, he clicks icon and the cost is subtracted from his budget ($5/day). Budget Keeper is the daily record of money spent/ day. Personal Page links to user’s facebook and twitter. When user performs activity, an alert post is automatically pushed out. User can also create own posts with text, links, and pictures. Ranking is based on a point system. The user receives a point per social media contact raised, i.e. new follower, like, retweet, share. The viral nature of the competition spreads awareness around Grameen America and the Challenge’s purpose. The Prize: chance to meet Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus.
Existing Work on Project: No work has been done thus far. We only have created a twitter account for the challenge.
Technical Skills for Hackers: Programmers should be comfortable with coding mobile applications. The site should be written in PHP to be compatible with Facebook coding. The site will incorporate facebook features to run the challenge. The programmers should also be comfortable with Twitter APi as all activity updates will be sent through twitter as well.
City of Palo Alto - City Viewer
Organization Description: We are the local government of Palo Alto. It is a city council governed community. We provide all city services including utilities.
Project Description: We would like to create a clean web interface to existing data on our infrastructure (specifically road conditions). We want to make it easy for city residents and others to be able to search by street and view both the description of the condition of the street and view a google or bing streetview. There may be 1-2 other data sources about the street that we would like to pull into the viewable record. For example, there may be photos of trees or buildings. It would be worth exploring whether a user can also upload a picture that gets added to the record and is then viewable by anyone who visits the street web page.
Existing Work on Project: The core data is available. The database is set-up and accessible. No other work has been done.
Technical Skills for Hackers: Web programming - use any web framework. Database is SQL.
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.
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.
The Bottom Line - The Bottom Line
Organization Description: According to the CDC, colorectal cancer accounts for the second largest number of cancer-related deaths in cancers affecting both men and women every year. Yet 90% of patients treated in the earliest cases of colorectal cancer survive and more than 60% of colorectal cancer-related deaths could have been prevented with routine screenings. The Bottom Line is a campaign to increase the number of colorectal screenings and reduce the number of colorectal cancer-related deaths. Through interactive media, we mobilize Gen Y to start a dialogue about colorectal health with their parents and other older loved ones. We want people of all ages to get informed and inspired to promote colorectal health and fight colorectal cancer.
Project Description: The Bottom Line (thebottomline.org - domain pending) intends to be the leading destination for meaningful, constructive and irreverent dialogue about colorectal cancer.
Using interactive digital media to empower everyone to be a colorectal health advocate, The Bottom Line initiates, perpetuates, and humanizes a conversation about a tragically overlooked issue.
The Bottom Line will need an elegant interface and straightforward humor-inflected language to engage users. Simple navigation is crucial to ensure that anyone regardless of age feels comfortable on the site. We also might create a version of the website in Spanish, as colorectal cancer tends to go undiagnosed longer in Hispanic populations.
The pledge will be the central part of the website. The site would ask visitors to the site to sign a pledge to ask their at-risk loved ones to get screened and/or get themselves screened. To keep track of the demographics, I will have optional fields for people to enter their age and zip code. Facebook Connect could also be another possibility for audience research. The system will also help visitors keep their pledge by sending periodic reminders every month.
The Bottom Line will have content such as videos explaining the cause; video and picture e-card colonoscopy reminders; and a real-time counter displaying how many signatures the pledge has.
The Bottom Line will strive to become ubiquitous in social media in its mobilization of younger demographics to inform the population at-risk for colorectal cancer. The Bottom Line understands that the 50+ crowd may not be the most tech savvy so we may give users the option to fill out a postcard online to mail to their parents. We might use the API from Postcards on the Go to do this, but this would take funding that is still pending. We also might need to use API to send reminder texts from the website to phones.
Deliverables would be an attention-grabbing website with built-in social media integration. Colorectal cancer is not exactly the sexiest cause so I'm hoping that an engaging website will change all of that. Since the pledge is a huge component, we'll need to work in some simple system to collect the signatures and send email messages.
Existing Work on Project: No existing work just the content (copy) for the website pages has been written.
Technical Skills for Hackers: The site has no existing infrastructure and general web programming skills should work. Thank you!
teachaids.org - animation installers
Organization Description: Since 2005, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the fields of education, public health, communications, HCI, and medicine have been working together to develop rich-media applications to promote HIV/AIDS prevention despite numerous social and cultural barriers. TeachAIDS is dedicated to addressing the challenges associated with providing health education through the creation of free, research-based, culturally-appropriate learning materials. We believe in harnessing medical and educational expertise and utilizing technology to freely disseminate HIV and AIDS materials around the world to those who need them most. AIDS is a preventable and treatable illness, and with the proper education, it can be controlled effectively.
Project Description: we build culturally sensitive animations for different populations around the world to educate people about AIDS. a taboo topic that is hard to teach or not taught at all in certain parts of the world.
these flash animations are usually distributed on CDs or memory sticks. these animations need to be easily installed once the media is inserted into a computer. a dialog box should offer the ability for the user to play the animations straight from the media or to install the animations so they can be installed on another computer.
Existing Work on Project: we have an installer work on windows. however, it does not offer the option to play directly from a CD.
we also need one built for mac OSX.
Technical Skills for Hackers: someone who is comfortable with computers (mac OSX in particular) and some very light scripting would be able to help contribute.
task requires looking up options on how to build installers on a mac and how to script them to offer a play/install option to the user.
even just identifying what to use would be considered a success at the end of the day, but it is likely we can just build the whole thing out in half a day.
High Road Foundation - Charity Tollbooth
Organization Description: The High Road Foundation aims to fight abuse of the internet community by creating a system of use tolls collected to benefit a charity of a payer's choice. The "high road" analogy references the historical development of highways to bypass local traffic, and such is our goal for the internet. We hope that charity tolls will deter abusers without alienating constructive users. In economic terms, we aim to convert market inefficiencies into public goods. We are an IRS-registered charitable operating foundation, currently in the 501(c)3 process, and thus is required to distribute nearly all income after operating costs on a regular basis.
Project Description: In general, the main abuse we're fighting is the abuse of our collective attention. To stop this, we need a way to collect a charity toll for bringing things to a user's attention. The idea is that if you want other people to pay attention, you should be willing to pay a donation.
The system will be a set of fairly simple toll collection modules for a few different scenarios:
- Email: a way to send somebody an email, and pay a charity toll to get them to read it, much like LinkedIn's InMail system, but not tied to any specific site.
- Access: A way to set up your site to require a charity toll for access to certain resources, similar to recaptcha with token exchange.
- Phone Toll: A toll for SMS and voice services, handled entirely by cell phone (Twilio).
- Top-poster: A comment forum that gives 'top time' to posts based on the donation made. Should plug in to popular frameworks easily.
- Social Toll: Same for social networking updates/tweets/whatever.
For this project, it would be awesome to see some of these concepts hacked up and demonstrated as a usable and fun application to get people comfortable with the concept of donating to their own favorite charity. Our research suggests that the best application for early concept adoption is internet dating (or pornography, but let's hold off on that for a bit). Thus, the suggested project is a very simple internet dating site that works in the following way (in traditional Man hunts Woman motif):
- Woman makes a simple profile, just a picture and text
- Woman sets a toll that Man has to pay to email her
- Woman pays a toll herself to get placed at the top of the list
- Man knows that Woman is legitimate because she paid a toll
- Man pays toll to email woman
- Woman knows man is legitimate because he paid a toll
- Happily ever after etc.
The system of tolls works here because Man and Woman both have reasonable assurance of the legitimacy of their inquiry, and thus have greater insight into their real options, whereas a free transaction would be flooded with false options (prostitutes, copy-pasters, scammers, etc.). This gives a better result for all legitimate market participants.
So you can see that this is pretty simple, but it shows a lot of the power of the concept to eliminate spam and frivolity. In the process, the team may think of other or better ways to use this principle to increase the efficiency of the dating market, and create a public good in the process.
The components from this project will be modularized for embedding in other sites, but we can do that later. Mostly, we'd like an app that people want to use because it gives them better results with a small donation than the free alternatives.
Existing Work on Project: The project is hosted on Google App Engine and uses Google Checkout's In-App Payments. Right now, there is a very simple application that collects a toll for URL redirection similar to tinyurl, so all the external components are implemented, and it's all imagination from here. I'll add the Google accounts of developers to app engine and we're good to go.
Technical Skills for Hackers: Google App Engine
Python / DJango or Java/JSP
Basic AJAX / jQuery etc.
some imagination in behavioral economics
Sustainable Silicon Valley - Environmental Resource Management Tool
Organization Description: 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. After focusing on carbon emissions during 2006 through 2010, the organization began to focus on water and energy more recently. 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.
Project Description: We wish to develop a web-based application that allows city managers to track and manage wastewater and other resources across multiple collection and treatment centers. Our academic advisor for this effort is Stanford’s Prof Craig Criddle (http://www.stanford.edu/group/evpilot/) and his graduate students have developed Excel-based models of resource usage. They have asked SSV to help migrate these models to the web. The application will support:
* A data model for resources, resource consumption and disposal, resource treatment, and the geographic connection of resource management centers to provide net flows or balances.
* A front-end to allow city managers to operate the application
* Business logic that implements the formulas located in the Excel spreadsheets.
* Geographic map-based displays
Existing Work on Project: This will be the first effort to connect the research models with web technology. We will be starting a new application in this project, but extracting models and code from SSV’s EcoCloud code base where relevant.
The project team will be provided with Excel spreadsheets, and a Ph.D. student from Prof Criddle’s team will attend to 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.
Technical Skills for Hackers: There will be two main tracks of design and development. The back-end developers should be familiar with web application tools such as Grails, Java, and Spring, 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 Grails.
In the first hour, the Ph. D. student will provide domain education for both teams. In the next two hours, the backend developers will be provided with a UML modeling tool for data model design work, and the backend developers will be provided with an on-line wireframing tool for front-end design work (at project start there are few designs for the front-end).
In the last six hours, we will focus on integration of front and backend.
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. The project team will have the opportunity to give a follow-on presentation to Prof. Criddle and/or to Phil Bobel, environmental manager for the City of Palo Alto.
DIYDev - Information-sharing Platform
Organization Description: DIYDev is a non-profit organization aimed at helping students, volunteers and development practitioners from around the world join together to share specific knowledge and experience that helps them improve social development projects, from the planning stage to the real-world implementation. Similar existing sites don't do a good job of filtering information (so that only tested and proven resources are made available) or focusing on the process (e.g., a Peace Corps volunteer can find plans for how to make a community water treatment system, but not information on whether that solution actually appropriately addresses the problem, or even how to find what the problems are).
Project Description: The website is will be a repository of information contributed by community users, “experts” (another category of users), and site admins. This may include videos, photographs, documents or testimonials, which will be organized in categories like topic (e.g. biointensive agriculture), region (e.g. Mexico), phase of project (e.g. "monitoring and evaluation") and media type (e.g. videos). We would like the website to be built using an open-source CMS (Drupal is preferred) so we can easily add extra features as the project grows, but we are definitely open to other suggestions.
Before the Code Jam, we will also provide jpg “screenshots” of how we visualize some of these pages will look. We are also very open to suggestions.
Deliverables (in order of priority for us)
1st Milestone
- Establish general site layout
- Allow user's registration and login with Facebook or Google accounts.
- Build a set of classification categories for the content to be posted.
- Build 4 special layouts for a theme (Drupal compatible) with site menus specific to each
- A homepage (minimalist)
- Region-specific profile (e.g., Service projects in Mexico)
- Topic-specific profile (e.g., Composting) - similar to http://learnto.herokuapp.com/class_rooms/2)
- Profile specific to phase of project you are in (e.g., Assessing community needs for an agricultural project)
- User profile layout (profile picture, interests, pages contributed, etc.)
- Expert profile (similar to user profile)
- Allow users to submit new projects as well as to comment on other projects or content pages
- Add a forum feature that can be attached to a certain project and organized by the same categories
- An advanced searching module
- A way to sort and display information in list form under subheadings of region, topic, and project phase, as well as by date added/modified and by contributor
2nd Milestone
Pleasing graphical design of the user interface for the DIYDev platform.
3rd Milestone
A live chatting room with experts and other users (widget like. No login required. Ex. http://daxon-mcu.blogspot.com/)
Existing Work on Project: We are running Drupal 7 install on our bluehost server at diydev.org. We will provide the volunteers working on this project the necessary credentials to access the server.
Technical Skills for Hackers: As we are already running Drupal, knowledge of PHP and experience with Drupal or another CMS would really be appreciated. Additionally, skills in graphic design would be amazing; none of our team members are designers.
Endowr - Endowr "Enabler"
Organization Description: The Problem: College students often receive insufficient or no financial aid, and often have to take unfair and high-interest loans to pay for education, taking on debt and risk, especially without guarantee of future employment, limiting education access.
Our Solution: Reform college financial aid, by treating it as an investment in the future. Endowr is a revolutionary way for students to receive financial aid for college, by perceiving them as individual startups. Investors invest in students’ demonstrated potential, and after graduation, receive a percentage of the students’ salary for a limited period of time. This creates an interest-free, no-risk option for students, and a socially-conscious, low-risk, and high-return investment for investors, while keeping Endowr self-sustainable.
Project Description: The project is to create a web-based tool which serves to match and link students with investors. After securing www.endowr.org/.com, we aim to create a service similar to AngelList for students seeking funding for college.
A simple overview of the project is that it will have two sides, an investor and a student. For the student, they will be able to upload their profile, with key sections such as basic facts, a photo, statement of purpose, amount seeking, resume, and references, and will serve as an "application" overall. They should have the option to determine which info to keep private and which info to not keep private. For the investor, a similar profile will take place, with their company affiliation, types of students they are looking for, etc (More details are available in our basic layout). Each group should be able to search for the other, and easily contact them (i.e. email address). There will also be an option to make them Endowr Endorsed, meaning this is a student we have screened and determined to have good potential. The web-based platform will serve as the initial contact between two parties, and once they both reach an agreement, Endowr will step in to make the transaction complete. The Endowr Enabler website will be key to our organization's mission, as it will help us have a groundbase and framework to start recruiting students and investors, and matching them to each other. It will be a simple and user-friendly product to use, and the design reflects that background. Once again, there's a lot of room for suggestions/improvement, and the programming team has individual choice, but we have a basic idea and general trend/idea of what we would like it to look like.
We understand that this may be a large undertaking, especially for one code jam, so we think the deliverables we would want to focus on our a front page and the two profile pages (complete with a login and user-input).
If we can get this achieved, Endowr will be well on its way to achieving its mission! We really appreciate your help in helping make our vision a reality.
Existing Work on Project: We have some basic layout/interface work done, but no operating functionality at all. Really open to starting fresh and design changes/implementations are completely welcome if programming team finds necessary! We have a GoDaddy hosting account (with domains, FTP, SQL, etc) and can give you immediate access to that if needed.
Technical Skills for Hackers: CMS-based website (would need CSS, PHP, jQuery, or other web-based programming language knowledge). Also, SQL management would be great!
Raxa JSS - Mapping Sickness and Health
Organization Description: More description is included in this Google Doc. I Have also contacted Sam King directly with this information.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r_X-CD1d1BNhl_-F5aw1rI7bjtU_06uHNfrq...
Project Description: See Google Doc
Existing Work on Project: https://github.com/Raxa/Raxa-JSS
https://source.openmrs.org/browse/Modules/raxa-jss
This task is independent... No context regarding existing code-base should be required.
Technical Skills for Hackers: JavaScript
Python
Mozilla + Ideas For a Better Internet - Collusion
Organization Description: Mozilla is a proudly non-profit organization dedicated to keeping the power of the Web in people's hands. We're a global community of users, contributors, and developers, working to innovate on your behalf.
Ideas for A Better Internet is an interdisciplinary Stanford-Harvard class, taught by Jonathan Zittrain and Elizabeth Stark. Alex Moss & Margaret Hagan are Stanford Law Students, and they are working with Mozilla on developing Collusion.
Project Description: Collusion helps you protect your privacy by showing you what websites are sharing information about you as you travel across the Web.
Most of us are vaguely aware that there are web advertisers out there that make money by tracking our web activity, and not all of us are comfortable with that. But what do we do about it? It seems like a very vague and abstract problem, so it's all too easy to put it out of mind and keep surfing the web as if we were still anonymous.
Collusion takes this invisible tracking and makes it visible, letting you watch the watchers. As you move from website to website, Collusion draws a visual graph showing the connections between websites that have exchanged information about you using third-party cookies.
Mozilla's mission is to fight for the freedom of individual user choice on the internet. Mozilla is supporting Collusion in order to empower users to make more informed decisions and have more control over their privacy on the Web. Collusion is currently a Firefox add-on. We would like to develop the add-on for other browsers as well so that everyone can use it. We are also considering the possibility of turning Collusion into a built-in feature in a future version of Firefox.
Collusion is already usable, but there are a lot of features we want to add to it. We want users to be able to click a website on their Collusion graph and tell Firefox to block cookies to/from that site. We want users to be able to export their graphs, compare them with others, and combine their graph data anonymously to build up a more complete picture of who's tracking people on the Web. We want to integrate Collusion with other privacy efforts like Do-Not-Track. We want to make the visualization way cooler - perhaps making the graph 3-dimensional, or plotting domains on a map of the world. We'd like to extend Collusion to follow other methods of tracking such as Flash cookies and beacons. Ultimately, we hope Collusion will help change attitudes about privacy and tracking and help users put pressure on advertisers to be more respectful of their privacy choices.
So there's lots of work still to do. By hacking on Collusion, you can learn about how web browsers work, learn how websites exchange information about users, and learn cutting-edge HTML5 data visualization techniques. More importantly, it's for a good cause - educating users about privacy and helping to make the internet a better place.
Existing Work on Project: The add-on is currently usable, showing a graph of sites as you travel the Web. At present it's Firefox-only, the graph is based only on third-party cookies, and there isn't yet an easy way to share your graph data or to block certain sites from tracking you.
You can see a demo and install the add-on at http://collusion.toolness.org . That add-on is a few versions old, however. To get the latest version, go to GitHub where development is ongoing. Go to https://github.com/toolness/collusion and you can see the latest work and also download the code. If you have Git installed on your computer, you can clone the repository. The README on that page explains the prerequisites of the code and how to get started. Open issues (bugs and feature requests) are at https://github.com/toolness/collusion/issues?sort=created&direction=desc... .
Technical Skills for Hackers: Collusion is a Firefox add-on written using the Mozilla Add-On SDK (formerly known as Jetpack). The UI is in HTML and all the logic is in Javascript. Collusion uses SVG (scalable vector graphics) to draw the graphics, uses the library d3.js to map data onto the graph, and uses the jQuery library to manipulate HTML.
Knowledge of any of these frameworks and/or knowledge of writing Firefox add-ons would be extremely helpful, but if you know Javascript you'll be able to pick up any of the other skills involved. I'll be on hand to teach the Firefox add-on APIs, explain the third-party libraries, walk people through how the code works, and answer questions.
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.
Nilsby - Website
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.
Existing Work on Project: Some open source code that we can hack on together!
Technical Skills for Hackers: Python and familiarity with Django
UCSD-Mozambique Healthcare Initiative - Global Health Solutions for Africa
Organization Description: The UCSD -University Eduardo Mondlane Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI) is a bi-directional collaboraton between universities in the United states and Mozambique to promote medical education and enhance medical care in Mozambique. The partnership plans to leverage mobile and web technologies to provide new age healthcare solutions for third world countries.
The project already has real hospitals in Maputo, Mozambique using websites that we have developed. Our goal is to grow these services even further.
Project Description: This project will help in our organization's mission to build programs to support the diagnosis of patient illness, treatment of patient illness, monitoring and reporting of diseases.
We are looking to specifically implement the following:
1. A "20 questions" user interface for patient's to drill down to the specific problem they might be facing.
2. Insightful visualizations of vital signs such as blood pressure, average blood glucose, pulse per day, etc.
3. A decision engine that given a disease, will determine the severity of a condition and recommend "call a doctor tomorrow", "call 911", "read more online", etc.
The design of how this website will look is very open ended, and we are looking for creativity on the side of the developer to come up with engaging interfaces for the components of this project.
Existing Work on Project: There have been several websites which have been developed in support of this effort. Here is a list below.
1. http://23.21.224.101/ - A website to predict a patient's diseases given their symptoms.
2. dokbot.org - Q/A website for doctors to answer questions about patient's issues.
3. mepimoz.dimagi.com - A website currently in use in Mozambique, Africa. Made for doctors.
Information that you would need to get started is just asking yourself what you think would make for a great global health application. We are looking to link all these websites together into one coherent dashboard for people when they are seeking solutions for their medical needs.
Technical Skills for Hackers: Any general web programming skills will work. We want to build a beautiful and engaging user experience, so work in Javascript, HTML, and CSS will be a help. This is a great project for those who want to learn something new as well, as our goals are clear but the specific design of the website is open-ended.
Skills in Python will be useful if you want to do parsing of medical documents.