4th Annual Houston Hackathon

This weekend I attended the Houston Hackathon v4. It was an amazing experience, to say the least. I got to meet very talented people and work on a project that helped the Houston Community. This article will highlight the many brilliant projects that were created.

Contents

1 What is the Houston Hackathon?
2 What we worked on
3 What others created
- 3.1 Top 4 Winners (in no order)
- 3.2 All other Houston Hackathon v4 submissions

What is the Houston Hackathon?

The City of Houston Hackathon is a 24 hour gathering of hundreds of software developers, designers, and people who want to make Houston a better place to live. Even if you have no coding knowledge you can show up and work on a project. I had somewhat of an idea I wanted to work on before coming to the event with my partner. We ended up pulling an all-nighter to finish our project.

What we worked on

Me and my partner, Kaci Delafosse, created a website that hosts an interactive map which provides resources to homeless and LGBT Youth.

Demo: http://ealdana.com/hackathon2016

We are in the process of creating an application and are continuing development of this project for the City of Houston. Stay tuned for updates!

What others created

Seriously, all of the projects the other teams worked on at this event were amazing! I loved them all and I can’t wait to see how they all grow.

Top 4 Winners (in no order)

Johns Beware

A project dedicated to ending sex trafficking by reducing demand, supporting law enforcement, and creating awareness.

Demo: http://houston-traffick-stop.github.io/johns_beware/

Task Bounty

Acts as a service marketplace where citizens can submit tasks that have not been addressed in a timely manner by Houston 311 with bounties attached. Other private citizens or contractors who would like to claim the bounties by fixing the issues could do so.

Demo: https://dev16788.service-now.com/taskbounty.do

Invoice Dashboard

Imagine you’re a vendor doing business with an organization that is based only in one city but has 22 different accounts payable organizations and processes everything in paper manually? Now imagine you’re a leader in this same organization with 22 different accounts payable groups. How would you manage given limited the limited visibility into this siloed, paper based environment? This organization is the City of Houston.