 Welcome to Think Tech on OC-16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Jay Fiedel. And I'm Elise Anderson. Our show this time will take us to a retrospective discussion on HAC, the first Hawaii annual code challenge, and how things are going. The challenge was organized by the Hawaii State Office of Enterprise Technology and ran from August 27th through September 24th. The purpose of the challenge was to bring local tech and innovation talent together to develop software tools and applications that could be used to provide better services for the state and the public. It was also intended to provide opportunities for students to network and show off their skills to both public and private sector communities and to take the traditional hackathon model to a new level for Hawaii. The opening day of the challenge drew a full house of programmers who accepted the call. Think Tech covered the opening pitches there and our movie of that played a few weeks ago on OC-16. The challenge period ended on September 24th and a few days later, the leaders and some of the participants had a retrospective to discuss the event and what would happen going forward. A select group from HAC met at the High Tech Development Corporation conference room at Manoa Innovation Center. Think Tech was there to find out how things had gone and how they were going. So I should give you background first of all on us purple Maya. A lot of you guys know us already, but I'll just say we're a technology education non-profit. We're about three years old at this point. And the work we're trying to do is create access to technology education for more kids. That's the broadest range is just more kids, but we're particularly interested in opportunity youth. That's a lot of folks that are calling that kind of youth disadvantaged youth or at risk youth. We like to call them opportunity youth. And we're particularly interested in teaching Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students also. And girls. I mean there's a number of reasons for all of these things, right? There's lack of diversity in the tech industry, those kinds of stats have been coming out. And then if you look at like within Hawaii, there are four public high schools that teach AP computer science. I think they're the only high schools that teach computer science actually. So that's none at the middle school level. And those high schools tend to be in kind of more advantaged areas, right? So there's a problem of access, and so that's what we're about. So one of the things that we talk about too is like, okay, so what are we headed for in trying to teach these kids these skills, right? I mean obviously A, we believe that it's going to be important skills for the future. So they should know, right? But then there's like BCDEF, there's like all these other reasons, right? One is that especially if you're working with like low socioeconomic areas, you're teaching kids skills that could get them jobs later, right? Like this could be the push out of poverty that's necessary. And that's like one part of the mission that's super important to both Donovan and Olin are other co-founders, right? Because they both grew up in circumstances without a whole lot and technology has been, you know, kind of a blessing for them, right? So there's that aspect of it. But then like the question becomes like what are we preparing these kids for? Are we preparing, like are we trying to say like here we're going to educate you in Waianae so that you can leave Waianae to get this job in Silicon Valley, right? Some students might choose to do that and that could be fine. But we kind of got to a place organizationally when we were asking ourselves like what are we doing simultaneously to kind of prepare the ground for these students so that they can potentially stay in Hawaii. And part of the things we do with culture that make us a little bit different is that we're trying to really seed all the work that we do with this idea that technology is a tool for helping communities, right? That's what we're about. We're not just teaching these kids these things so that they can go off and make a ton of money if they do make money, fine. But we're also trying to give them a tool that's like powerful and that they can use to change their circumstances, to change things for their community potentially. Technology can't solve everything, but it can certainly help a lot of problems, right? So that's kind of like the long speech about like what led into the purple prize. I mean it has to do with people asking hard questions too about being like, how big is tech in Hawaii? How many jobs are there? They're asking all these kinds of things and you have to find the statistics. But anyway, it became apparent to us that we need to be working on both fronts, right? So the purple prize was kind of one way that we're answering that question about like, how are we fostering the tech community and kind of pushing things in the direction we want them to go as far as fostering projects and teams of people that are working on really good projects that serve the world or their local communities or others, right? Another big source of inspiration was just like some article we saw online like someone posted it on Facebook. It was about a Zen hackathon. And it was an interesting article because it was about like the culture of technology. So like my understanding of hackathons and I have to admit I haven't actually been to one. So sorry, I should make it to one sometime soon. But my understanding right is that the culture is like you stay up all night. You're like drinking energy drinks. It's like there's like this kind of like American bravado to it. The Zen hackathon was something that they arranged in Japan and they did it very differently. They like took place in a temple. Everybody meditated in the morning. There were like these nice like kaiseki meals being served that were like locally sourced. So it was like a really different take on how to do a hackathon. And so then that inspired us and got us thinking like what would an aloha aina hackathon look like? I'm here to talk about the Hawaii annual code challenge. The event kind of got started around the June timeframe. I got a call from ETS, which is the Enterprise Technology Services Organization, which is kind of a new organization in the state of Hawaii. It actually is the merged group of what was previously known as OIMT, Office of Information Management Technology and ICSD. And they kind of merged together and they became ETS. So the governor had gone to a couple of hackathons. So he went to in 2015 and 2016 he went to the AT&T Hackathon over at UH. And that was a well, you know, like a two day 48 hour hackathon. And as a result of that hackathon, there were other, you know, there were other judges there. So there was David Lassner was there, Garrett Yoshimi was there, and Todd Nakapoi from the state CIO was there. And they were judges. And they all talked and during I think the 2016 AT&T Hackathon, I think it was Garrett that might have said to the governor, hey, we ought to do a state hackathon. So then the governor said, oh, that's a great idea. Todd, let's do a state hackathon. So that's kind of how it got started. And then I got a call to be a part of the organizing committee, along with Jason and Dev League and the folks over at HTDC. So we kind of met actually, let me back up before we even met. So this was kind of the, you got to, I get a call, but I don't really get any further discussion about it until probably way into the July timeframe. So we don't really physically meet. We have this sort of like, hey, what's going on with the state hackathon? Oh, I don't know. I haven't heard anything. So there was kind of an incubation period. And then we finally get together and we actually meet everybody and talk about, you know, what is it that we have in mind or what is it that they have in mind? And what resulted was the traditional hackathon, which is kind of a 48 hour event. I felt that, you know, since we have done some of these shorter events, and we've also done the longer event. So we've done a 30 day, actually it was a little longer, it's called Civic Accelerator, where we built some applications around campaign spending data. We felt that there was a lot more opportunity to see some well developed prototypes. They're not quite finished product, but they're further along than an early stage idea. So we suggested that they do a 30 day event. And then that's what happened when they went back and they thought about it. They decided they're going to do the Hawaii annual code challenge. Now what was interesting about the acronym was that if you say it, it's hack. So if you want to go check out the website and the results from the event, you can go to HACC.Hawaii.gov. And then you can see, you know, what was, what is there up on the website now. So as a organizing group, we got together and we kind of talked through what it is that we wanted to do. We wanted to, you know, I came from sort of the open data arena. So I wanted to see us push on more open data to be made available. And in order for us to do that, we had to identify which departments, which state departments had data to make available. So the ETS team went out and they actually talked to some of the departments and said, hey, so, you know, what do you guys have in terms of data that you might want to make available. And in addition, they wanted to also ask what are some of the challenges that your department faces. So that we can, you know, we can sort of dovetail the data and the challenge together. Well, it turns out that the, not too many departments actually had data. In fact, if you see the results of some of the projects, they were actually projects that proposed going out there in crowdsourcing some of this data. But what was really kind of a cool thing was that we were able to get the departments to do a reverse pitch. So this reverse pitch was they're going into a crowd and saying, okay, this is the problem that our department faces. And these are some of the resources that we might have that could help, perhaps, you know, help maybe solve this problem. We have some subject matter experts that we can make available so that you can talk to and maybe get an idea as to the process. So what we tried to do was we focused in on the intersection between community, citizens, and government. So these were not projects that would talk about, let's say, internal processes per se. These were more about what is the challenge that you currently face for your department to interface with the community. My name is Jason. Again, I am one of the co-founders of Dev League, which is a coding bootcamp. So we do a lot of hackathons and we kind of plan and participate in a lot of these events. So I kind of, I didn't really plan much. I came in with six questions and just kind of threw out, you know, everyone else talking. I've got a page full of notes just kind of hearing, you know, other people's, you know, perspectives and kind of bringing thoughts to mind. So which is kind of how I like to do these things is based on the context of the conversation. So, you know, in terms of we've, we planned our own hackathons. We participated in other people's hackathons. We've kind of co-assisted on, you know, things like hack and what have you. So, I mean, so we've kind of done a lot of these events and kind of figured out, you know, what works well, what doesn't work so well, what, you know, we could do better, what, you know, I mean, all around. So I think just in terms of kind of not just to kind of add on to the conversation tonight is, you know, how do we continue to do things hackathons or events that kind of bring value and learn from past experiences. And I think that's kind of the best thing I could share at this point. So just kind of some bit, some background in terms of the ones that we've done. We actually, our first hackathon was Civ Accelerator with our first cohort. And that was, that was a great event that kind of set the stage for Dev League as a whole to continue to kind of do these events. And I don't know that that, you know, that really wasn't planned out until that time. And that was kind of happening. We were like, hey, we should do this thing. And it fits within the context of our curriculum. And now it's really turned into something that every cohort really looks forward to and wants to participate in is like what what hackathon do we get to do? So we participated in Civ Accelerator, Startup Weekend, multiple global game jams, multiple AT&T hackathons. We partnered with Hack. We did a few meteor hackathons. We planned our own Uber and NASA hackathons. And so so we've kind of done a few of these things at this point. And so just in terms of the I guess the big bold text that I have in front of me, planning hackathons is hard. Planning events is hard for anybody that hasn't done them. You know, and I think this will tie into a little bit into one of my, you know, kind of notes that I have a little bit later. But just to call it out is that these things are not easy to do. And so in terms of extracting value and wanting to do these and wanting to get, you know, more engagement and more events like that, you know, for anybody that doesn't know, just kind of, you know, it's one of the things that I think I realized being in it was like, holy crap, you know, this is not easy. And, you know, just kind of like, you know, we're just talking about, you know, when's our next one is that we just finish hack. And every time I finish one of these things, I'm like, I never want to do one of these. Like, you know, like it's exhausting. It's a lot of work. But we continue to do them for a reason. Two of the biggest things I think that in terms of notes that I have in terms of the planning is logistic suck. Like coordinating all these things is very hard. We've done it from a very small team of like three people planning an entire event to the total opposite of what we had with hack, where they had like an army of interns doing all of this busy work and we really just got to be planners and not like the executors all the way through the janitors, you know, and like, that was kind of cool. Like I definitely enjoyed that more than the ones that we do where we do everything from, you know, lining up sponsorship to cleaning the toilet, you know. But it's difficult and it's not, it's not really fun. Lining up a venue is difficult. That's that's what I think those are probably the two biggest challenge in terms of if anybody wants to plan an event is those are the two of the biggest considerations that that you need to kind of think about is every little detail who's going to do it and it has to kind of get done and be coordinated and way easier. It sounds way easier than I actually is. Venue is very difficult. You don't know how many people are going to show up. Venue is one of the biggest costs that you have is that everybody that has space wants to charge you for that space and it's not necessarily cheap. And you can be creative with that, you know, with the right partnerships. People are, you know, maybe kind of willing to, you know, give a little bit, but not always. And especially like what we had with hack where we needed a large space. And definitely I would say that the venue had the upper hand in terms of those negotiations, right, in terms of they knew what they wanted. It was a larger space. It's a more of a kind of commercial space. And it's like, here's our rules, take it or leave it. We're a smaller hackathon. It's like, hey, we bring you some value, you know, you bring us some value and there's kind of some play there. If the question is, do we have the innovators necessary to support challenges like this? It seems clear that we do. It's encouraging that the people involved are willing to invest their time and to share their knowledge. We need to teach each other in order to connect up an industry. At the moment, many large businesses go to the mainland for development of their applications. We've got to change that. We've got to show those companies that our IT development community has what it takes. The challenge is a way to do that. The seriousness of the challenge taken together with the number of people who participated suggests that there is a dawning among the millennials and others that reflects a growing awareness of the importance of IT to the community, to them and to the future of our state. Great. And it's about time. The vitality of the group and the apps the teams came up with are good cause for optimism about the challenge and the likelihood that the solutions developed will have value for the state. We think the challenge got off to a good start. Now it remains for the agencies involved to engage the developers in ongoing productive profitable relationships. The important thing is to build confidence in and among our budding IT development community to show that local developers can build world-class applications to solve local problems. It's about time we found the confidence to build an IT industry that can compete in the market and offer jobs to our people. We hope the administration will do a code challenge every year, just as planned. We also hope the administration will hire the winners and support their projects. And we hope that the legislature will appropriate the many millions necessary to update the state's IT systems and incentivize the growth of the industry. That's an exciting possibility and that's why we should all stay tuned for more. And now let's take a look at our ThinkTech calendar of events going forward. So much is going on in Hawaii. Remember you can watch ThinkTech on OC16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government, industry, academia and communities around the state. ThinkTech will take you there. Remember also that ThinkTech broadcasts its daily talk shows live on the Internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekend. And some people listen to them all night long and on the weekend. If you want to replay or share any of our shows, they're all archived on demand on ThinkTechKawaii.com and YouTube. For our audio stream, go to ThinkTechKawaii.com slash radio. Visit ThinkTechKawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links or, better yet, sign up in our email list and get the daily docket of our upcoming shows. ThinkTech has a high-tech green screen First Amendment studio at Pioneer Plaza. If you want to see it or be part of our live audience or if you want to participate in our programs, contact Think at ThinkTechKawaii.com. Yes, you can help us raise public awareness on ThinkTech. Go ahead, give us a thumbs up on YouTube or send us a tweet at ThinkTechHI. We'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives in Hawaii. We want to stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's Think Together. Here's this week's ThinkTech commentary. I'm Anu Hitto, host of Climate Change Beyond Outrage, where we discuss solutions to climate problems facing people, nations, and the world. Today, I want to talk about climate change in natural areas. Plants move. Did you know that? They move to find the best situation possible. Water, nutrients, temperature. And with climate change, we're seeing more of that movement. One of the trickiest things for natural areas managers is how to deal with such changes in species distributions, what to do when your fave plant moves out and something else moves in. The Natural Areas Conference held last week at the University of California, Davis, with over 600 attendees, may have been a little smaller than the 10,000 people World Conservation Congress held in Honolulu last month, but it was every bit as important to conservation. But before we get into the guts of what happened at the conference, a word on what is a natural area. According to the Board of the Natural Areas Association, it is a geographical area having an individuality developed through natural growth rather than design or planning and representing some value in terms of biodiversity. What this means in the age of the Anthropocene is still under discussion, or up in the air when it comes to climate change. The Anthropocene defines the Earth's most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that Earth system processes are now altered by humans. So what impact does human-induced climate change have on natural areas? And more importantly, what do we do about them? Turning words into action, that was the theme of the conference. Field scientists are definitely seeing changes that can be attributed to increased warming or changing environmental conditions, summarized Dominique Bachelet, Senior Climate Change Scientist at Conservation Biology Institute. She hoped to see more managers using available information to inform their practices, something that has always been a bottleneck and conferences like this one attempt to address that issue. So who attended the conference? People who look after natural areas, natural lands managers, land trust staff and volunteers, biologists, ecologists, researchers, policy specialists, educators, students, and anyone with an active interest in environmental conservation and natural area stewardship. And this time, one member of the media. While conferences like this one do not get much media attention, they certainly could benefit from a strong social media presence to archive lively and critical discussions that form the basis of on-the-ground management. The conference provided a venue for many disciplines to come together. One such example was a panel on climate change communication with academics, managers, and educators. A half day of sessions in a small group format allowed participants and speakers to interact freely. No cavernous conference room for this event. A group out of UC Berkeley with Adina Marilander presenting is attempting to create climate stewards in California. Others are working with tribal governments and groups to address climate change adaptation. There was lively exchange around the issues of restoration and the complications associated with global change. Seven top scientists addressed challenges faced today. Ecologist Don Falk emphasized experimental methods and long-term monitoring to map uncharted territories that lie ahead. One of the best events was the poster session. It was a hubbub of activity with students and senior scientists presenting their work. Birds, bugs, and computer conservation tools all geared towards climate change adaptation. And that is exactly what the conference aimed to do. Help managers deal with the onslaught of climate change. According to Lisa Smith, Executive Director of the Association, we've done this thoughtfully and deliberately so that practitioners could leave the conference with firm ideas of how to take action when they return home to their work. For more information, follow me on Twitter at Anu underscore hittle or on Facebook, climate change beyond outrage. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of Think Tech. But first, we want to thank our underwriters. That wraps up this week's edition of Think Tech. Remember, you can watch Think Tech on OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it, just like Elise does. For additional times, check out oc16.tv. For lots more Think Tech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on Think Tech, visit thinktechawaii.com. Be a guest or a host, a producer, or an intern, and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks for being part of our Think Tech family and supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification, and globalism in Hawaii. You're going to watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Jay Fiedel. And I'm Elise Anderson. Aloha, everyone.