I love hackathons, but they are gross. 48 hours, no sleep or showers, and cheap food/beer. You build something awesome but you walk out smelling like PBR and Axe body spray (the preferred scent of college co-eds everywhere). 

Enter: Girl Develop It (cue: superhero theme music). Jump Thru founder and friend of Girl Develop It Deborah Jackson contacted us last month with an incredible offer. She told us that she had rented a six bedroom house in the Hamptons for the month of July, and asked if we could use it for anything. We were so ecstatic for the opportunity to plan our first hackathon. 

We are tired of the usual hackathon setup, and we’re doing our own take this time. We will have a pool, and wine, and delicious barbecue. While we are enjoying these things we will be building multiple solutions to help a charity we all believe in. 

Last week we gathered at Deborah’s home and together twenty-five women convened to plan the first ever hackathon to combat human trafficking in New York City. The event brought together a wide array of accomplished professionals, including Internet and social entrepreneurs, experienced front-end and back-end developers, and seasoned executives in strategy and marketing.

Christina Arnold, founder of non-governmental organization, Prevent Human Trafficking, and Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship at NYU, was a guest speaker. She spoke to the group about her personal experiences encountering human trafficking as a child and about her innovative technical solution to prevent human trafficking in Southeast Asia using SMS, or short message service, technology. After the presentation, the group split into three focused groups to explore new technical solutions that would be created during the three-day long Hackathon scheduled for July.

We concluded that the weekend of July 15-17 we will be headed to the Hamptons, laptops in tow. We plan on attacking this problem from several different angles, and to do that we will be putting together several groups to work together over this long weekend. 

Be prepared for a lot of tweeting, eating, and developing. We will be keeping the public abreast of our goings on, by tweeting out the hashtag #GDIHHH and filling our streams with pictures of coding in the sun, developing on lounge chairs, and toasting long evenings over buzzing laptops. 

We have a handful of spots open to the public to join us. We are looking for a diverse mix of skills. You can apply here: http://bit.ly/jCpQpo. For those following along at home make sure to tune into #GDIHHH, look there or at this blog for what he have built on the conclusion of the weekend. 

As usual, thanks, and happy developing!