First off I want to wish everyone a wonderful Thanksgiving and joyous Holiday season. This year has gone by extremely fast and 2018 is shaping up to be another eventful year. I’ve been delinquent about posting the results of the 2017 Hawaii Annual Code Challenge which surpassed 2016 in numbers of attendees and student teams. Winners were impressive for both years and if you want to see the archive for submittals in 2017 you can find them on our Devpost site.
All total we drew 300 participants at the Kickoff event held for the first time at the East West Center. Demo Day was also held at the East West Center featuring 20 teams that made it through the technical pre-qualification process, something we instituted as a result of feedback from 2016. Congratulations to all the teams. We’ll be monitoring process in this post-HACC period.
We also had 7 high school teams participate including Kamehameha School (Kapalama), KS Hawaii Island, KS Maui, Mililani High School, Waipahu High School, Punahou and Iolani. This has prompted us to look at creating a high school event called HACC4Edu. Stay tune for more details on that event.
Next up, I’d like to shift gears and bring your attention to the upcoming #GivingTuesday event on November 28, 2017. This year, as in past, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Facebook are teaming up to match any donations made to your favorite non-profit. If you are reading this post I hope you will consider Hawaii Open Data as one of those charitable organization worthy of your generosity. You can make your donation directly through this page on Facebook. All fees will be waived during the #GivingTuesday period starting at 8am EST (3am HST). Monies received will go toward administrative costs of running Hawaii Open Data and activities planned for 2018. Much Mahalo in advance.
Here’s a list of activities coming up in the very near future:
AGathon – Hawaii’s first agriculture theme hackathon, held in partnership with the Hawaii Technology Development Corporation. Kickoff event is on January 6, 2018 and the hackathon/demo day is the weekend of January 13-14, 2018.
HACC4Edu – This HACC event will be specific for high school teams focussing on the 4 pillars I consider to be foundational to HACC: coding, data, design thinking and civic engagement. We are partnering with our friends at STEMWorks and the HACC4Edu demo pitches will take place at the annual STEM Conference in April 2018.
Legislative Update – There are two bill in the works, one for the post-HACC program that was introduced in 2017 (HB1329) and a new bill to consider codifying the Hawaii Annual Code Challenge as a program to be managed by a department in the State. Right now it’s a project taken on in part by our friends at the Office of Enterprise Technology Services.
That’s a quick update of some of the near term projects coming up. Thanks again for the continued support over the past year and into 2018. Please have a wonderful and safe Holiday Season.