Developer Challenge: First Ever Hack-a-Thon for Youth Health

Win Fantastic Prizes – Meet Like-Minded People

Get Inspired – Create Change

ISIS is hosting our first ever hack-a-thon, together with our partners TechSoup.. A hack-a-thon is a live event bringing together developers, designers, innovators and entrepreneurs to build exciting new apps and tools, in this case to improve young people’s health and wellness. This short and focused event – 1 day only – will result in the rapid development of interesting concepts and working prototypes that will be developed further by the participating teams back at their desks and at future hack-a-thon events, with ISIS and TechSoup as partners for future product development and distribution.

Theme: The Unmentionables

Challenge: Design an app to solve the challenge of providing honest, real-time, private data from youth and young adults about “unmentionable” activities, like sexual behavior, substance use, sadness, and relationship drama to researchers and program experts who work with youth.

Date: March 31st, 2012

Location: San Francisco, CA

Sponsor: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation President’s Grand Fund of the Princeton Area Community Foundation

Judges: Representative from TechSoup Global, Representative from National Institutes of Health, and Representative from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Speakers: Researchers from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Program specialists from ISIS, Inc.; Hack-a-thon experts from Health 2.0 and TechSoup

Rewards:

• A chance to meet like-minded innovators and connect around critical issues in adolescent health.
• An opportunity to sharpen your skills and develop new ones.
• Oh, and a grand prize of $1,000 cash.

Registration: Registration is free. Be sure to let us know you’re coming using the form below, so we can have enough food and schwag for everyone.

Registrants are encouraged to sign up and attend ISIS’ annual Sex::Tech conference, beginning April 1-3rd in San Francisco where the hack-a-thon winners and concepts will be announced. www.sextech.org

Background: The health field has been trying to prevent the most common adolescent and young adult health problems since time began: sexually transmitted diseases, depression, substance abuse and dating violence. By the age of 25, more than 90% of young adults will have experienced more than one of these problems, and for some youth, the consequences will be lifelong (infertility, homelessness, brain injuries, etc.).

It’s almost impossible to know what works in terms of prevention efforts, as health researchers rely on survey answers given by youth after the fact with questions such as: How many times did you use a condom for sex in the last six months? Now, really, who remembers?

We want to put the best and brightest minds in tech behind the solution. We want an app where young people are enticed and excited to share their Unmentionable data – data about the whos, whats, wheres and whens of their risk behaviors - in the moment or soon after.

Sponsors:
ISIS, Inc. is a non-profit organization based in Oakland, CA, working nationally with youth and young adults to engage them in their own sexual and reproductive health and healthy relationships. Our mission is to provide leadership, innovation, educational resources and research in online sexual health promotion.
www.isis-inc.org

TechSoup Global is a non-profit organization founded in 1987 on the belief that technology is a powerful enabler for social change. Since then, we’ve assembled a worldwide network of individuals and organizations that share this conviction and working to develop innovative solutions to our most urgent social challenges.

Yes, I’m Coming to the Hackathon on March 31st in San Francisco