Nearly 100 developers, designers and do-gooders spent this past weekend building technology solutions with one common goal: To end homelessness in Seattle.
The inaugural Hack to End Homelessness event wrapped up Sunday evening at Seattle’s Impact Hub, with 12 teams pitching ideas to curb the city’s homelessness problem. Projects ranged from a social network for homeless people to a detailed map that visualizes homelessness for 25 major metro areas in the U.S.
The goal of the event, which we featured in this piece last week, was to encourage participants to envision and create ideas that help alleviate the homelessness problem in Seattle. Several local homeless services and advocacy groups submitted project proposals and many were completed this weekend.
Other ideas included an app for on-site data collection by Union Gospel Mission search and rescue van volunteers — which was beta-tested on Saturday night — and an intake interface for YouthCare that will help the program place homeless youth in shelters.
“There were several other extraordinary achievements, including lots of data clean-up and education for our non-profits on how to improve their data gathering,” event organizer Candace Faber said. “By bringing best practices from tech to non-profits, we can reduce noise in the data and make it easier to analyze trends.”
Faber told us last week that she hopes this event will result in deeper understanding of the homelessness issue and help reduce tension between tension between the housing community and tech workers.
“We have a culture of innovation, a technologically talented population, and a social conscience,” she said. “When you put those three things together, we’re able to act as an incubator for solutions that could help the entire world as well as our own community. We’d like to keep it that way.”
Related: Can technology end homelessness? These Seattle entrepreneurs are aiming to solve the problem
