Loyola University Chicago Hunger Week 2015, November 2-6
LuTech is planning for a Hackathon event for Hunger Week. The event will be a hackathon involving Loyola students coming up with creative ideas on how to tackle the social justice issue of hunger either locally, nationally or globally.
Hackathons are varying in purpose and design so it may be easier to describe 'Why is a Hackathon a thing?' instead:
For all of these reasons:
Community.
1. To learn & teach.
2. To solve problems.
3. To create something new.
4. To meet like-minded people.
5. To build, because building is fun and rewarding.
6. To gain the respect of peers, through creative expression.
7. To collaboratively push the limits of technology as we know it today.
The gist: a hackathon is an event where a bunch of tech (and non-tech) people work together in teams to work on creating new approaches to tackling the problem topic.
We want this hackathon to be multi-disciplinary. We want students, faculty and staff from varied backgrounds to come together to work on creative solutions for the issue of hunger. We will be advertising to all majors.
The goal of this hackathon is not to come up with a world-saving solution to hunger. We want people from diverse backgrounds to come together to have an actionable conversation on the issue of hunger, specifically some of the issues brought up during this year's Hunger Week.
We are shooting for likely a max participant number of 50 people (10 teams of 5) and at the very least 18 people.
We would also like this event to raise money for Hunger Week. We are currently debating on either requiring some sort of fee to participate or a highly suggested donation on the day of.
We are tentatively planning the event to take place on Friday, Nov. 6th and Saturday, Nov. 7th. This would be Friday evening and Saturday morning though the late afternoon.
Part I: Pre-Hackathon
This is the Friday night element of the event, probably 6-8pm. There is a meet and greet with the participants. Teams will be sorted (3-5 people each) and ideas will be hashed out. We will likely have someone speak about the issue of Hunger, or even highly recommend that participants go to other events of Hunger Week, so that the teams will understand a piece of the puzzle that they are going to work on.
Part II: The Hackathon
The participants will arrive around 8am where there will be some small breakfast snack items. From there they will get into their groups and start 'hacking' their idea together. There will be lunch served. Teams will continue to work until around 4pm. They will present there projects to the group. We have not decided whether or not we will make it a competition with winners and prizes (of which we will put together a panel of 3 judges) or a group gathering to work on something awesome. The projects will be featured on the hackathon's website once things are finished.
We are currently looking to supply food for the event through multiple different avenues including donation or reduced pricing from Whole Foods, Aramark and Felices. We will get funding for this either from participation fee or from Departmental funding/SAGA.
LuTech is putting together posters to canvas campus with to raise awareness about the event. We will also contact all of the Departmental Heads and ask them to email their students and potential offer some sort of extra-credit to participate.