The Code for the Kingdom Hackathon

Below is an interview with Dave Travis, Chief Executive and Chief Encouragement Officer of Leadership Network. They recently organized a hackathon for kingdom technologists in the Bay Area. Dave tells us more about it.

What is a hackathon?
A hackathon is when a bunch of technologists and business folks gather over a limited time period to develop new solutions to problems and challenges. Most of them currently focus on developing simple web apps to solve an issue.

Why is Leadership Network doing this hackathons?
For almost 30 years now, our role has been to foster innovation movements that activate the Church to greater impact. We do that primarily by working with leading churches, but we saw a whole group of great, talented believers working in technology companies and needing a way to use their gifts to activate the Church.

How many projects?
There were about two dozen total projects being worked on during the weekend. Maybe eight of them were well underway before the gathering, but they came to get some additional technical help and other feedback. About ten or so were totally new ideas that came right out of the weekend.

Prizes were awarded – who won?

• The Social Justice award went to an app called Free as Me. A team member from International Justice Mission came to present the challenge of developing a way for people to report potential child traffickers in a secure way and find ways to verify the reports to rescue these persons from slavery. It had to be designed to work in places where smart phones are rare and internet service is spotty. By the end of the weekend, they had a working prototype.
• Healthier Stronger Ministries awarded Plus Bible. This is an app which allows users to create custom “notebooks” where they can read and comment on a Bible passage together regardless of where they are. You can set it for private or share with your social network.
• There were several Bible-type applications in the competition and Logos Software gave a Special Award for IMDBible – an app that helps you establish all the links in every Bible story and their relations to each other. It was neat, visually. In fact, I think Logos was trying to figure out a way to partner with this weekend crew to incorporate the code into their products.
• The winner for Best Spiritual Formation was an app called Abide. The project leader told me he had been thinking about this for five months and had done some code work. But after about nine& people joined him, they made some significant changes for the better. He called it a "prayer and generosity app." It is stunningly simple. You open the app on your smartphone, and it asks, "Who do you want to pray for?" You can select any individual or group from your contacts if they are on your Twitter, Facebook, email, or text message lists. Once you select it, it says “Begin to pray now”. You speak your prayer to God for this person into your phone. It records your prayer. Once you are done, you hit send. It sends a copy of your prayer to the person in an audio file. They open the message which says, “You have received the gift of prayer,” and then they can hear you praying for them.
• The Best New Code winner came in from a small team. The project was called I’ll Join You The original idea came from a pastor in Tennessee who found out about the event one week before and dropped everything to come to San Francisco. Leveraging the online community our team built, he found a Los Angeles coder who could get behind it. A business guy from Menlo Park Church also joined them. Here’s how he described the challenge: “Create an app/portal where the passion, skills, education skill-set, etc. meets the needs of the church. Think of it as crowd sourcing that can be used by church attenders. Most churches create mission projects and ask members to help. Why not see what the members are passionate about first, and then create mission projects. I believe this would drastically change the way the church makes ministry happen."
• The Grand Prize Winner was an app called Likewise. Likewise begins with the philosophy that everyone can mentor someone in something and can receive mentoring from someone. Imagine three simple screens after you sign in with your social ID (like Twitter or Facebook). You are asked what skills or mentoring YOU can give to someone else. Then you are asked what you would like SOMEONE to mentor you in. You can list several things. The third screen is a community code (your church has a unique code). It then shows you who in your church needs mentorship in an area where you have that skill set and those that can mentor you. It can be very spiritual things – like prayer, fasting, or everyday things like finances, carpentry, and car repair. If you identify someone you want to mentor YOU, you can send a request through the system. That person can choose to accept your request or not. And the system learns by a rating system both who is best and who is willing to give help.

Now none of these are available yet in the Apple store or Google Play store but my guess is that many will be soon. In fact, some have established web sites where potential users can stay informed.