San Francisco Bay Area’s top engineers invited to participate in 24-hour hackathon hosted at Change.org’s headquarters, Winners to receive $10K in seed funding

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Change.org, the world’s fastest-growing platform for social change today announced a 24-hour hackathon, “Hack for Change” to create web and mobile applications to advance social change in partnership with Code for America and Mashable. The weekend event on June 17th and 18th at Change.org’s headquarters in San Francisco’s SOMA district looks to accelerate a growing movement of using the web to transform advocacy, philanthropy, government, and politics.

“The San Francisco Bay Area is home to the world’s top web designers and developers -- many of whom would like to use their skills for social change, but have not been asked,” said Ben Rattray, the founder of Change.org. “Hack for Change is looking to tap into the tech community to help build apps that change lives and to provide an easy first step into the technology-for-good movement.”

Any developer or designer interested in using the web for social good is encouraged to register for the hackathon at HackforChange.com. The event will begin with presentations from leading nonprofits and companies featuring data sets useful for building social change apps, after which participants will have 24 hours to build a useful mobile or web application. At the conclusion of “Hack for Change,” a panel of judges will select the winning applications and award ten thousand dollars in seed funding to the top three finalists.

“Hack for Change joins a growing movement that is using technology for social change,“ said Jennifer Pahlka, Executive Director and Founder, Code for America, one of the organizations partnering to host the event. “We are excited to see the new apps that are developed and the people who are inspired to use their technical skills to enrich public life.”

The public is encouraged to submit their ideas for apps that that they would like to see developed during the hackathon at https://hackforchange.uservoice.com.

For more information and to register for “Hack for Change” visit:

http://www.hackforchange.com/

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Change.org is the world’s fastest-growing platform for social change — growing by more than 300,000 new members a month, and empowering millions of people to start, join, and win campaigns for social change in their community, city and country.