Contents

What is the Code for a Cause Hack-a-thon?

• Develop simple prototypes of innovative applications for non-for-profit organizations that may have difficulty funding projects themselves.
• Expose attendees to various open source development tools.
• Expose attendees to an abbreviated project development cycle, including requirements gathering, project architecture and requirements specifications, development, quality assurance and client communications.

What Happened at the Code for a Cause Hack-a-thon?

• An Online Homeless Shelter Search - The Code for a Cause flagship project, developed after consultation with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (CCH), was an online mapping mashup application showing the locations of homeless shelters throughout Chicago.  The mashup allows users (especially social workers and case workers) to find specific shelters based on a variety of geographical and shelter specific criteria.  Users can search by address or by social services offered.  This functional prototype can be used by the CCH to help obtain funding to implement a full scale online homeless shelter search for city wide use.
  
  You can see the results of this project at http://homeless.codeforacause.org/.

• A Prototype Website for a Non-profit Organization - Another project involved the creation of a prototype website for a small environmental non-profit which currently utilizes a proprietary and inflexible content management system. Several Code for a Cause developers rebuilt the entire site, recreating all of the content and functionality, using the open source Drupal(http://drupal.org/) content management system.
  
  See what was developed at http://www.codeforacause.org/.

• An Online Survey Management and Reporting Tool - Finally, an online survey management and reporting tool was built with Web2Py, a python-based framework. The application, developed in only a few hours, satisfied many of the survey tool's original requirements and was well received by Hack-a-thon attendees.

• A Python Screen Scraping Tool - A screen scraping program to be used for simple website migrations where there is no underlying database or no access to the database.

Special Thanks

The Flourish Team would like to give a special thanks to the Chicago Technology Cooperative for hosting Flourish 2008's Code for a Cause Hack-a-thon.  We could not have held this event without their help.  To learn more about future Code for a Cause volunteer hack-a-thons and coding sprints, visit the Chicago Technology Cooperative's Code for a Cause website located at http://www.codeforacause.org/.

We would also like to thank O'Reilly for offering to send a free book to the most active Code for a Cause Hack-a-thon participants.

Media

Video of Jim Craner presenting on the results of the Code for a Cause Hack-a-thon Saturday evening at the Flourish Conference 2008 Closing Ceremony:

Downloads from the Flourish Conference 2008 Closing Ceremony:

• Xvid Video (AVI) (66.7 MiB)

Photos:

• Code for a Cause Hack-a-thon
• Flourish 2008 Closing Ceremony