Civic hackathons adopt a healthy approach

 A new "code" emerges for how they are conducted.

HUDDLE UP: Hackfit participants work on fitness apps earlier this month at Impact Hub Philly in Northern Liberties. Getting some exercise and noshing on healthy foods were part of the weekend session.
Neal Santos

Michael Henry was hunched over his MacBook Pro, a half-eaten slice of pizza in one hand and a half-empty can of Pepsi beside him. Hundreds of lines of code glared back at him from the screen. It was just past 11 on a Saturday night, and he wasn’t even halfway done. “I can’t do this anymore,” he muttered under his breath. But he would: There were still 12 hours of the Philly Codefest to go.

This wasn’t a typical weekend night for Henry, who is 23 and will finish up his computer science degree at Drexel University in June. Rather than joining his friends at a bar, he was spending the weekend building an app that would track SEPTA buses in real time. Some would call it crazy. Others call it a hackathon.

Hackathons, which already have a big foothold in Philly, challenge computer programmers, software developers, engineers and anyone with big ideas to create original software and hardware from scratch, all within 48 hours. The best prototypes are rewarded with cash awards and occasionally, attention from venture capitalists scoping out early innovation. 

But hackathons, which have been popular here since the early 2000s, are becoming less about trendy apps and more about solving real-world problems. Local hackers are paving the way for “civic hacking,” or using technology to solve city, state and neighborhood problems. And these marathon code-writing sessions are taking a turn toward the healthy in order to produce better results.

If anyone could pinpoint the origin of civic hacking, it would likely be about three years ago with solving issues in transportation — a theme that programmers like Henry, with his bus-tracking app, are still working on. 

“It came from people who looked at SEPTA’s website and said, ‘We can do better than this,’” explains Mark Headd, who until this month, served as Philadelphia’s chief data officer. “Hackathons were originally conceived to foster innovation, and now that idea is being adapted to solving civic problems.”

In 2011, a weekend-long hackathon called Apps for SEPTA focused on creating applications with SEPTA’s data and programming interfaces, some of which SEPTA actually implemented.

But since then, interest in civic hacking has ballooned, with hackathons devoted to solving citywide political problems (Hacks for Democracy), water quality (Philly Enterprise Hackathon), disability and aging (Random Hacks of Kindness) and education (EduTech Hackathon).

“Philly is really progressive in this respect, compared to other cities across the country,” says Andrew Thompson, who works for Azavea, a company that builds geospatial software for civic use. “That’s due, in large part, to the interest and willingness of the city government to collaborate with hackers.”

And it’s not just SEPTA that’s on board. In April 2012, NASA chose Philly as one of the locations for their International Space Apps Challenge, a multi-city hackathon aimed at space innovation. In its report, NASA remarked on the innovations that came out of the hackathon — including a project called ISS Base Station, a device that tracks the position of the International Space Station in real time over a map of the world, which was created by a Philadelphia team and earned the international award for Best Use of Hardware.

As the scope of hackathons is expanding to tackle larger civic problems, the structure of hackathons is adapting, too.

“The whole idea of a hackathon, in the classic sense, is to generate a prototype,” explains Headd. “But in Philadelphia, where we have a pretty well-developed civic-hacking culture, people are starting to strain against the traditional construct of the 48-hour hackathon.”

Take Hackfit, which turns the traditional hackathon structure on its head. Instead of surviving on pizza, Red Bull and adrenaline, Hackfit participants nosh on healthy foods, take exercise breaks and turn in before midnight each night of the three-day competition.

Michael Henry, who participated in Hackfit this month, noticed a marked difference in his mental clarity at Hackfit compared to Philly Codefest. And the emphasis on health paid off: After 3,000 lines of code and 12 hours of exercise, his team took first prize. 

Not only was his prototype — a playlist-generator for fitness instructors — more developed than the apps with “sloppy code” he had written at previous hackathons, but he concluded that “actually, it was probably the healthiest weekend of my life.”

Other hackathons are encouraging hackers to move beyond the 48-hour constraints. At Hacks for Democracy, team members created apps during an initial hacking weekend before they were invited to develop their prototypes over an additional three weeks.

Thompson, who helped to organize Hacks for Democracy, said that programs in the second round of judging had “improved dramatically.” He believes that hackathons like this offer not only the initial spark of innovation, but also link coders to like-minded do-gooders.

“Hacking is sort of the gateway drug into these larger systems of collaboration,” he says.

Some hacking is rejecting the classic hackathon model altogether. Code for America, a sort of mecca for civic hackers, hosts a weekly civic hacking “Brigade,” where many people return week after week to develop fully functional apps.

On May 31, Philadelphia will participate for the second time in the National Day of Civic Hacking. The innovation could touch on anything from addressing the city’s education problems to improving government technology — one line of code at a time.