Charity Hack Weekend - what got built

By sophdea on Friday, September 25th, 2009 in JustGiving Technology

The first ever Charity Hack Weekend took place at PayPal’s UK offices in London last weekend. The concept was simple – a bunch of web developers were to come together and build an application (for the web, for mobile) that could help charities in just 24 hours.

On the Saturday, the developers were introduced to and given access to PayPal’s new API (application programming interface), JustGiving’s test donation API and Missionfish’s cash giving API. Using these tools they had until Sunday lunchtime to build something useful. The results were interesting, and we’ll share just a couple…

The winners of the prize for best mobile application were the ‘GetGiving’ team. They made a prototype of an iPhone application that allowed people to choose their favourite charity and make a donation using JustGiving’s test API. The idea was to create an app that took care of the ‘Dave gap’ – the time where people have some time to kill and could use that time to do some good, be it waiting for a bus, train, or just sitting on the loo!

One of the developers said that he gets a lot of requests from his friends for sponsorship for things they do on JustGiving and wanted a way to remember to make those donations if he was too busy at the time of getting the first request. This app would serve as a way of allowing him to make a donation at those times when he was stuck for something to do.

The winner of the best overall app (judged by a group of experts, including our CTO Jason) was the team named ‘charity frag’. Before I say what their app was, the overriding concept for the app was to introduce a charitable aspect to something people enjoy doing – playing online multiplayer games.

In their case, they had built an application that worked within a ‘first person shooter’ game. Each player chose a favourite charity, and when they killed another player in the game, that person had to donate a certain amount of money to the victor’s charity.

Now I can see people getting uneasy at the thought of killing someone in a game (however virtual it may be) to raise money for charity, but the concept could be used in other games too – whether it be someone playing Mario Cart on the Wii, or Guitar Hero on the Xbox, having a system of forfeits in other games where players have to pledge money to charity would probably be more amenable to charities and potentially successful.

Their goal was to introduce charitable giving and new causes to an audience that is maybe not reached by the marketing already being done, and the judges thought it did that well. Whilst in the early days of the web everyone’s goal was only to drive traffic to their own website, these days you need to go where people are spending their time (be it Facebook, Twitter or online games) and engage them on their own territory.

All the applications that were built will not necessarily go live, as the point of the weekend was to see what the developers could build and the ideas they had. Having said that, there were some great apps built and some of them have great potential.

As far as we were concerned, it was great to get other developers using our test API and we got some great feedback on how it could be improved were it to be put live and freely available (we don’t have plans to release this in the immediate future). Jason, Adam, Eugene and Rasha from our tech team were there to talk to all the developers and hear what they thought.

There’s certainly a lot of potential for using our, and other APIs, to build all sorts of applications that are useful and interesting to a user yet also encourage charitable donations in a way that’s not been done before. That’s what was really exciting about the weekend.

You can find out more about the other apps built on the day (and see a video of the weekend) on PayPal’s blog, or read a post from one of the developers (Dave Hawes) who took part. Plus there are photos from JustGiving and Desigan.

Tags: API, Charity Hack

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