Finally, a hackathon that isn’t a sausage fest

When I worked at the newspapers, I was surrounded by women. My bosses were women. The tech scene, however, is a different jungle. Developers and entrepreneurs are usually male. Sexism is rife, and women are often feted for reasons other than their competency.

Which was why I found United We Hack, run in Singapore by United Nations Women and AngelHack, particularly refreshing. Held on August 15 to 16, it had a healthy dose of femininity – a good one third out of about a hundred participants were women.

The gathering was a change of scenery; you don’t often see girls in school uniforms mingling and posting photos on Snapchat at a tech event.

There were no booth babes serving as ornaments. Just good ol’ pizza and beer, and people typing furiously away on keyboards, eyes glued to the screen. Thank god there weren’t any brogrammers peddling an app called Titstare as a joke either (yes it happened at TechCrunch Disrupt).

Instead, the hackathon sought ideas to promote gender equality. The winning team, ACRS, came up with a way for women to report crime or spousal abuse through ATM machines. Since there’s no need to speak to family members or the police, societal pressure against reporting is circumvented. Next, the data is collected and classified using a concept extraction API by HP, so that governments and advocacy groups can easily detect trends and hot crime zones.

Another winning idea was a discrete SMS hotline for reporting abuse. This gives women with no internet access a voice. Volunteers on the other end can steer them towards the right kind of help. Data from chat transcripts is then anonymized and aggregated for analysis. The open source code can be viewed here.

With the tech industry criticized for navel gazing and focusing on so-called white-people problems, any attempt to fix our gaze on emerging markets and the bottom of the pyramid should be welcomed.

The challenge, as always, lies in making these ideas scalable and self-sustaining. Fortunately, the winning team will receive mentorship from Startupbootcamp, while the better ideas will also get advice from UN Women. These efforts may help the teams turn their weekend project into a lifelong venture.

I’ve seen some interesting startups come out of hackathons before, though they’re admittedly rare. I hope we find an exception here.