The beginning of the two-day Hack for Social Impact attracted computer engineers, data scientists and other professionals to develop tools that Bay Area nonprofits and international organizations can use to address a range of problems, such as navigating complex building codes that can drive up the cost of developing local affordable housing, tracking tenant rights violations on the Peninsula, and analyzing the effects of land degradation and drought globally.
The event organizers offered cash prizes and project grants to whichever teams developed "viable, impactful solutions" that nonprofits or world leaders could use to improve their day-to-day work or advocate for policy change.
Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto and UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation are two of the nonprofits that hoped to benefit from the hackathon, along with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.
"We have seen a technology boom in generative AI over the past few years, but not every organization has gotten to benefit from it," said Cher Hu, the founder of Hack for Social Impact and one of the planners of the event, which concluded Sunday. "That's why we're organizing this movement to activate top engineers and AI talent in Silicon Valley to innovate public interests."
The event was part of a growing number of hackathons where people come together over multiple days and compete to create tools or technical products not for personal or commercial success, but for the public good.
The teams at Hack for Social Impact were not required to use AI, but Hu said many of the problems they were trying to solve could benefit from the powerful technology, which can analyze reams of data and decipher trends.
Alysyn Martinez, a staff attorney at Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto, hoped that participants of the hackathon would analyze records from local administrative hearings that are held in parts of San Mateo and Santa Clara counties when landlords allegedly fail to correct habitability issues or illegally raise rents.
The hearings result in written decisions that can be 50 pages or more, Martinez said, adding that she wants to be able to analyze those decisions to better help tenants through the process.
"We're paper people, we're lawyers, we don't necessarily have the tools to aggregate that data," Martinez said. "The only way we have to go through them is to sit and read through them."
Lorenzo Barberis Canonico and the three other members of his team were debating which of the four causes they would work on Saturday morning. Barberis Canonico was leaning toward working with tenants on the Peninsula because it had the most potential to directly help people immediately.
"There's this creative element, but the thing ... that brings ultimate satisfaction is that you're building something that is usable," Barberis Canonico said. "We want to be able to show at the end of it a story of, 'Hey, we built this, and somebody used it by the end of the weekend.'"
© 2024 the San Francisco Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
