HackDays Toronto: the social good version!

Happy new year hackers and developers! We wrapped up 2011 with HackVan and are now ready to open HackDays 2012 with the first hackathon happening in Toronto. Hope you are ready to sharpen up your coding and hacking skills because this hackathon is just a couple of weeks away! In the coming weeks we will publish a full HackDays schedule for 2012 but in the meantime, here is the skinny:

  • HackDays date: Saturday February 11, 2012
  • Start Time: 9 AM
  • Location: Klick Health offices, 175 Bloor St. East
  • Registration is now open.

This hackathon is going to combine two great things: APIs + Social Media for Good to build applications that can change the world around us.  And we would like you to join us for the fun, the glory and the prizes: Mac BookAir, ipad, Kindle reader and more!

Hosted at Klick Health, developers, hackers, designers and anyone interested in hacking for social good are invited to participate in this Hackathon. The idea is to build a social good application using APIs of your choice.

Hackdays hackathons are awesome gatherings of hackers/developers who work either in a team or alone to build applications with publicably available APIs. HackDays started with HackTO in Toronto and had such a great time that we rolled out HackDays across Canada. Our first destination outside of Toronto was Montreal. hackMTL was a blast and the winners are enjoying their awesome prizes! We also wrapped HackOTT in Ottawa and HackWaterloo in Waterloo and are now looking forward to helping anyone across Canada interested in organzing a hackathon.

This Social Good  Hackathon organized by HackDays will be hosted by Klick Health and will be part of Toronto Social Media Week.

For HackMTL and HackOTT, we rounded up various public APIs from local tech startups and have made them available to local developers. We will be doing the same for this Social Good Hackathon except that this time around we are introducing a prize for the best application developed using a non-profit organization’s API in addition to one of the HackDays APIs and/or any other API(s) of your choosing.

Each HackDays API will be supported by someone totally familiar with the API (so you won’t be wasting time trying to find answers to your questions) and we will provide a great hacking  environment with caffeeine, pizza, snacks and prizes (and glory)! Working in teams or solo–and with expert guidance from our API sponsors–developers compete to create the coolest application using one or more of the available APIs. And just to make things interesting, this is all done in a few hours!

If you’re with either a technology company or a non profit organization that you think ought to be involved, or if you have any questions, drop us an email would love to hear from you.

BTW this is an all day event; breakfast, lunch and snacks provided! Our schedule will look something like this:

  • 9:00 – Breakfast and introductions: Meet your HackDays organizers and all the developers, get acquainted with the space + final schedule + grab a breakfast of champions!
  • 9:30 – API presentation: learn about the APIs available. Each API provider will have 5 minutes to introduce their API, discuss its salient features and get you excited about using it.
  • 10:15 – Open Planning: come up with hacking idea and build a team. This is a white board exercise: if you have an idea that you would like to work on, just put its name down on the white board; if you are looking to build a team, identify yourself to other developers with the skill sets that you need. If you are looking for ideas, identify yourself to other developers as well.
  • 10:30 – Hacking setup and start. You claim a little spot of the office with your team or by yourself and start working on your project. All the API providers will be on hand the entire day to provide support.
  • Noon – Lunch
  • 1:00 – Continue hacking – help yourself to all the energy snacks you need!
  • 5:30 – Application presentation – 3 minutes for each presenter!
  • 6:30 – Judging and prizes
  • 7:00 – Off to nearby pub for celebrations!

This Social Good Hackathon is made possible by Klick Health and HackDays.

Awesome API sponsors include: Context.ioFreshBooks, TinEye, YellowPages.

Register now. Our hackathon always sell out!

25 Jan 2012, 11:51am
HackTO
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