Hackathon Yackathon: Conversations on hacking as civic engagement

Hackathons are everywhere. They are often hosted by companies, governments, and community groups to attract talented programmers to work on a software project for slices of pizza. They are exciting, production-oriented environments to solve problems.

This symposium or rather, yackathon, is an opportunity to bring together the ideas, the outcomes, and the problems of hackathons into critical perspective. What is the politics and the potential of the now ubiquitous hackathon? Can it effectively support political action and civic engagement? What other methods of self-organized research and development can we learn from?

In other words, this will be a hackathon on hackathons. Similar to regular hackathons, participation and topics for discussion are open. Organizers and participants of any hackathon are invited to join for our afternoon discussion.

Are there themes, issues, questions, hackathon outcomes that you or your collective would like to share and discuss? Please post and rate topics on OccupyDataNYC.org (http://occupydatanyc.org/2013/04/08/april-28tnd-yackathon/).

Location

Eugene Lang Collect The New School, 65 West 11th Street, Wollman Hall, New York, NY

Schedule

12:00 - casual, informal sharing of methods and outcomes

2:00 - Welcome - Introductions from organizers, describing the agenda, starting the Google Hangout space, etc

2:15 - Panel Discussion - Hackathons Methodologies, Tools + Practices

3:00 - Coffee Break

3:15 - Panel Discussion - Hacking as Civic Engagement

4:00 - Hack a Better Hackathon. Discuss, Show & Tell

If you want to collaborate remotely, we will be tweeting with the hashtag #yackhack and using Google docs to collectively outline our thoughts and ideas!

Public GoogleDocs folder: http://tinyurl.com/ODNYCyackathon