A hackathon has been defined as:

• An invention marathon [1]  
• A design sprint-like event where people collaborate intensively on software intensive projects [2]
• An event of any duration where people come together to solve problems [3]
• Problem-focused programming event [4]

The spectrum of hacking events has evolved from having a focus on collaboration, agile development and software between 2012 to 2014 to an increased focus on data, healthcare and cities in recent years [5].  Industry led hackathon have become the flagship of the hacking space. However, hackathon approaches have also proliferated in educational (e.g. codecamps [6], semesterathons and summerathons [7]), governance (e.g. datathons [8], [9]) and social (e.g. civic hackathon [10], social good hackathon [11]) settings to address issues of shared interest by/for a community.

Hackathons represent valuable spaces where fruitful connections can be developed and, if well organized can create positive change, for communities and individuals [12]. However, hackathons have largely been critiqued for being a flawed vehicle for social change with qualities fundamentally incompatible with inclusion and equity [13].  Several authors have pointed out the following challenges with the current style of hackathons:

• “Spaces where structural inequality and unquestioned privileged are augmented” [12]
• Cis male and white dominated spaces [14], [15]
• Spaces where eating and resting are disregarded [4]
• Exclusionary by design, as its rigid structure unwelcomes females, people with disabilities and people with childcare responsibilities [15]
• An oath to technological solutionism that favors the making of the new over the maintenance of the existing [16]
• Embraces unhealthy power dynamics through competition (instead of collaboration) [12]
• Curtails the catalyzers for lasting social change and reduces the team efforts to create solution into few minutes of an entertainment pitch (by using shank tank presentation styles) [13]

As a response to these challenges, events that seek to infuse participatory design principles [12]–[14] to guide the design of hackathons to enhance inclusivity, equitability and intersectionality have emerged on this space ( for example the make the breast pump not suck festival). These events seek to hack hackathons so that they might “encourage an outpouring of ’non- traditional’ engagement with civic tech without alienating tech veterans” [38] and create joyful spaces [13]  where “the technological imagination and civic imagination collide” [15]. Especially they seek to question structural inequalities and privilege and change them through design. They draw inspiration from intersectional social justice-oriented design movements such as equityXdesign [17], Anti-Oppressive Design [18] and the Design Justice movement [19] to “extend design as a tool for challenging injustices and systemic inequalities” [13].
An ecosystem summary of all the types of hackatons mentioned here can be seen in figure 1.

Luckily not all are bad news, hackathons can be re-designed by deliberately putting time and effort into designing equitable, inclusive,  intersectional, joyful accessible and sustainable spaces for innovation. These guidelines are meant to be a shared resource to help the organization of hacking events (which we will be calling “commons jams”) that are guided by the Design Justice Principles, as well as by experiences from participants in the 2019 co-design studio at MIT participating in and/or organizing hacking events.

Guidelines document here

James Vorderbruggen and Edward Burnell

Through a year of co-learning, Ujima and Mass Mesh will organize a community-owned wireless mesh network in Roxbury and Dorchester to provide home broadband access.

The Project Collective

Ujima Boston is a democratically controlled investment fund that seeks to establish residents’ control over development in Roxbury/Dorchester, in response to displacements of communities of color in Boston. In our interviews with core Ujima staff and members, their key goals were:

• building up a cooperative economy and black-led futures
• creating agency and self-determination (as defined by community members) in Roxbury and Dorchester
• meeting neighborhoods’ needs, but also building community assets

In 2018 Ujima used assemblies, dot voting, and polling to learn resident’s priorities for the fund, and learned that the top three were (in order) community land trusts, community-owned internet, and child care. During the coming year, Ujima is assessing the feasibility of various ways in each they might build these assets locally.

Mass Mesh was started to “fork the internet” (i.e., build an alternative communications network) by people shocked at the Snowden revelations and the infiltration of Occupy Boston by police. In our interviews with core Mass Mesh members, their key goals were:

• building a network with security and anonymity built in
• infrastructure for “the working class, not the owning class”
• eschewing capitalism

At Freedom Rally 2018, Mass Mesh installed six nodes providing internet access across the Boston Commons. This pop-up network proved the feasibility of the hardware but dissipated with the event.

Mass Mesh, Ujima, and other individual and organizational stakeholders will be working collectively over the next year to organize this mesh network. There are valuable convergences and divergences in collective member’s goals, backgrounds, and knowledges. While Mass Mesh developers tended to point out concerns with privacy and security, Ujima members were more worried about questions of autonomy. Both Mass Mesh and Ujima membership expressed concern with any strategy that emphasizes outdoor internet access. Both groups are far more interested in getting internet into people’s homes.

Our Understanding of the Situation

People of color have less access, knowledge, and skills pertaining to information and communication technology because of the ways in which such infrastructure is owned, developed, and managed. These impediments also exist for people with low income (and doubly so for those in the intersection). Manifestations of this digital divide are everywhere, and is visible in both broad statistics (see figures below) and in the lived experiences of Roxbury and Dorchester residents. Such infrastructural inequity is both unacceptable and unnecessary.

One mechanism for the digital divide’s enforcement is the pursuit of profit by corporate ISPs. Internet providers often cite “lack of demand” as a reason to avoid building fixed broadband infrastructure in low-income areas. But what resident has no demand for internet access? The truth is, communities who lack financial appeal (or are “othered” by structural racism: after a Ujima meeting, one member joked about cable companies being unwilling to send vans into Black neighborhoods to do maintenance) get left behind in internet deserts with coverage by one or two low-quality providers, or more often, with no providers at all. Because infrastructural inequity has left the United States with broadband service that lags behind other developed countries, the FCC has attempted to map broadband coverage by census tract. Unfortunately, the FCC’s map is an optimistic speculation rendered virtually useless by its sampling methods. From FCC Form 477:

broadband connections are available in a census block if the provider does, or could, within a service interval that is typical for that type of connection […] provision two-way data transmission to and from the Internet with advertised speeds exceeding 200 kbps in at least one direction to end-user premises in the census block.

That is, rather than verifying the situation on the ground, the FCC just adds together ISPs’ optimistic maps of their possible future coverage. But even through such motivated projection, the competitive outlook for Roxbury and Dorchester is bleak, with only one or two providers in most areas. Residents know that the options available are even sparser than shown.

Such a lack of competition is built upon other monopolistic practices of internet service providers. Prior to 2005, cable and phone wires were considered Tier II (“common-carrier services”) in the United States. This meant that although most cable and phone wires were owned by a natural monopoly, local and regional internet service providers (ISPs) were allowed to use the wires to deliver data too. In 545 U.S. 967 (2005), however, the Supreme Court and FCC overturned their previous antitrust positions, affirming cable and phone wires as the private property of cable companies and so allowing cable monopolies to deny local and regional ISPs the right to exist. Consequently, at least 70% of all high speed internet service in the United States is now provided by just one company. This decision was reversed in 2015 with the Open Internet Order, which re-introduced net-neutrality. In 2017, though, Trump’s chosen FCC chairman Ajit Pai repealed this bill.

Simultaneously, legislation written by ALEC and other conservative lobbyists currently bans or significantly encumbers municipal Internet projects in 26 states, cable lobby groups have launched extensive advertising campaigns in opposition to municipal networks, and many government projects have been directly sued by the cable giants (presumably for over-delivering to their constituents). In Massachusetts, Charlie Baker’s 2018 economic development bill bars municipalities from using state funds to support broadband networks that would compete with private industry. Even if there were not such strong legal barriers to municipal internet projects, the necessity of trusting the City of Boston to maintain infrastructure needed primarily in poor Black neighborhoods reduces interest in municipality-owned internet.

Ujima members’ knowledge of telecoms’ ruthlessness has been expressed to us multiple times; no longer being dependent on them is a major motivation for interest in community-owned internet.

For details on our plans for the next year, see the full design brief! 

inPUBLIC is a 3-day festival in September that will take across public sites in Upham’s Corner and downtown Boston. The purpose of this festival is to activate spaces for public-making – where familiar and unfamiliar people can come together to engage with familiar and unfamiliar activities. Through forms of verbal discourse, such as panels and discussions, as well as other forms of discourse, such as art-making, play, and food, we hope to spark new ideas, conversations about difficult issues, and a stronger sense of a right to the city and its public-in-theory spaces.

Planning a  multi-site, multi-day festival requires a lot of thinking on spatial, temporal, and material factors. Within each site, the festival also requires thinking on how the energies of different activities and visual pieces will intersect — what kind of atmosphere will the festival create at different points in time? Given that many factors can change throughout the stages of planning this festival, we wanted to create something that could be used modularly throughout the planning process. As a result, we created a Festival Planning Toolkit that addresses 3 aspects of the planning process: figuring out the spatial layout of the activities at each site, creating a timeline for when different activities will take place, and understanding the logistical needs and impact of each activity.

Final Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FuvxVbgo-UOglYyyxz7CCUql2bVJFeXJrGN1UL9xfhI/edit?usp=sharing

Case Study: https://docs.google.com/document/d/182eItN75U8bk8lxks7opleBHE37tfM__-oM2vNrSx44/edit?usp=sharing

Below is the Google Slides presentation for this project, and a condensed version of the design case study. You can view the full case study online as well.

Context

This project was completed as part of the Spring 2019 course, “Civic Media Collaborative Design Studio,” in the Comparative Media Studies department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  The studio is a project-based course in which students partner with community-based organizations to design real-world civic media creations. The Spring 2019 version of this course was focused on “hacking hackathons” and organizing radically inclusive design events.

Team

This project’s design team consisted of two key collaborators: Bonnie Taylor and Samuel R. Mendez. Bonnie works in development and communications at Instituto del Progreso Latino. She has experience in documentary filmmaking, as well as in communications and management in the nonprofit sector. Sam is a master’s student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He has experience in video/animation production, as well as community-engaged public health research.

Project Partner: Instituto del Progreso Latino

Instituto del Progreso Latino, at-a-glance

Instituto del Progreso Latino (Instituto) is a Chicago nonprofit organization working on education, professional training, and employment services for the city’s Latinx immigrant community. It began its work as a 501(c)(3) organization in 1977. Today, its educational programs include:

• Career pathways training in:
  • Nursing
  • Manufacturing
  • Retail
• Adult basic education in:
  • English as a second language
  • Spanish literacy and elementary education.
• Youth Development
  • Escalera College Bridge program, offering tutoring, application assistance, volunteer/internship placement, and mentoring
  • Keep Educating Youth program, offering tutoring, physical activity, and meals for elementary students when school is out
  • Early learning programming for young children whose parents are attending classes at Instituto

In addition, Instituto operates three schools, serving a wide array of students:

• Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy, providing high school students with an education that focuses on preparation for college and careers in health care
• Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy, designed for students 17 to 21 years old who are returning to school
• Instituto College, currently offering a School of Nursing, with plans to issue Associate Degrees in healthcare, production and operations, manufacturing management, and more

Beyond educational and professional development programming, Instituto also offers citizenship services.

Ecosystem Map

City Services in Pilsen

There are a number city institutions working in Pilsen to help residents achieve their goals in education, employment, youth development, and economic security. As Instituto works with a population that the city overall struggles to adequately serve, it is important to understand Instituto’s work within this public service context:

• Chicago Public Library
  • Lozano Branch
• Chicago Public Schools
  • Benito Juarez High School
  • Manuel Perez Elementary School
  • Peter Cooper Elementary Dual Language Academy
  • Pilsen Elementary Community Academy
• Chicago Park District
  • Dvorak Park Fieldhouse
• WIC – Lower West Side

Other cultural, educational, and workforce development organizations in Pilsen

There are a number of institutions and organizations working formally in education and workforce development in Pilsen. It is important to understand Instituto’s work as part of a constellation of organizations working toward similar goals in the neighborhood:

• Casa Aztlan
• Casa de Cultura Carloa Cortez
• Casa Juan Diego Youth Center
• Casa Michoacán
• Chicago Commons – Guadalupano Family Center
• El Valor
• Elevarte Community Studio
• Frida K Community Organization
• Spanish Coalition for Housing
• Latin American Youth Center
• Mujeres Latinas en Accion
• National Museum of Mexican Art
• Pilsen Montessori
• Poder Works
• Saint Ann School
• Saint Paul Parochial School
• SER Central States
• St Pius V School
• St Procopius School
• YMCA – Rauner Family

Economic development organizations in Pilsen

There are several organizations that focus on the economic development of Pilsen. Given the ongoing tensions between plans to spur the economic development of the area’s industry and the need to advance the economic empowerment of current residents, it is important to view Instituto’s work in the context of such organizations:

• Economic Strategies Development Corporation
• Greater Pilsen Economic Development Association
• The Resurrection Project

Organizations offering educational and cultural services to a Spanish-speaking population across Chicago

There are other nonprofit organizations across Chicago working with Latinx communities and Spanish-speaking populations. A few in particular have a big impact on local culture and might reach the people that Instituto would like to inform about their classes and development programs. Though these groups may not operate in exactly the same service sector, it is important to view Instituto’s outreach work within this broader context:

• AfriCaribe
• Casa Central
• Chicago Bilingual Nurse Consortium
• Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement
• Puerto Rican Cultural Center
• Universidad Popular

Funders, for Instituto and similar organizations in Chicago

There are a number of foundation and governmental sources of funding that Instituto and other 501(c)(3) organizations in Chicago currently turn to for funding. Although the grant funding may be specifically for work with certain population groups or in certain kinds of services, it is important to understand Instituto’s work within the funding ecosystem for 501(c)(3) organizations working with Spanish-speaking populations in the Chicago area.

• Allstate Foundation
• Alphawood Foundation
• Chicago Community Trust
• Illinois Community College Board
• Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership
• Chicago Department of Family & Support Services
• Chicago Foundation for Women
• Community Memorial Foundation
• Crown Family Philanthropies
• Field Foundation of Illinois
• Franciscan Sisters of Chicago
• Greer Foundation
• Irving Harris Foundation
• JPMorgan Chase Foundation
• Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
• Illinois Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity
• Local Initiatives Support Corporation – Chicago
• Marguerite Casey Foundation
• Michael Reese Heath Trust
• National Able Network
• Northern Trust
• Oak Park River Forest Community Foundation
• Pritzker Foundation
• Illinois Department of Human Services
• John S. & James L. Knight Foundation
• Lloyd A Fry Foundation
• Polk Bros. Foundation
• Comcast, NBC5, and Telemundo Foundation
• Robert R. McCormick Foundation
• New York Life Foundation
• Speh Family Foundation
• TJX Foundation
• UnidosUS
• VNA Foundation
• Walmart Foundation
• White Sox Community Fund, a McCormick Foundation Fund
• United Way of Metro Chicago

Design Prompt

The prompt for this design project was to come up with a way of sharing program success stories with a wide audience. Success stories are currently gathered annually across Instituto’s wide array of programs as part of preparing annual reports. However, there is an opportunity to use more frequent sharing of such stories as part of outreach efforts to make community members aware of Instituto’s services. We were especially interested in ways of producing content that would be able to reach English- and Spanish-speaking populations. We approached this design prompt with an eye toward being able to create media content with Instituto clients at in-person events.

Design Justice Values

The Design Justice Network Principles informed this project’s co-design process. Three values in particular shaped thee process in the following ways:

1. Accountable, accessible, and collaborative process
   • We created a project timeline at the beginning of the project and came to an agreement of the roles we would each play. We made these agreements concrete through documentation in the form of a memorandum of understanding.
   • We kept meeting notes and prototypes in a shareable folder so other people at Instituto would be able to look in on the process if they wanted to.
2. Share design knowledge and tools
   • We shared with each other the design resources we had used in the past.
   • Sam shared resources from the Collaborative Design Studio class, as well as methods and exercises from past projects.
   • Bonnie shared her own educational resources on design processes, as well as analyses of illustrative examples of social media campaigns for us to draw from.
3. Prioritize design’s impact on the community
   • Throughout the process, we knew we would have ideas that we personally liked, but that might not make a lot of sense in the community Instituto works with. It was also important to try to get feedback that would let us know if some of our ideas might unintentionally exclude people or hit any dividing lines.

Background Research

The design process kicked off with background research to inform our approach to address this project’s design prompt.

Existing Resources

First, we took stock of current processes used to gather and share success stories as part of the annual reporting process. We walked through Bonnie’s current process of gathering storie. We also explored the affordances of Instituto’s website platform and content management system.

We saw an opportunity to enable the collection and sharing of stories with less depth and wider breadth through online methods, which would be more useful for reaching local community members than the longer stories used in the annual reports. Instituto’s current social media accounts also offered a useful starting point for thinking about how to engage local Chicago community members.

Analogous Examples

We also looked at the online activity of Illinois organizations that also served English- and Spanish-speaking populations: Mujeres Latinas en Acción, Puerto Rican Cultural Center, and the Joliet Spanish Community Center. We saw some useful examples for how to organize multilingual content, but we also saw that each organization handled its online presence quite differently. We recognized that there wouldn’t be a direct model to emulate or adapt, and a certain amount of experimentation and trial-and-error should be expected in this design process.

Local Expertise

We talked with an Instituto employee who specializes in partnerships and who has worked with Instituto’s university partners on community engagement projects. She urged us to think about local social media practices among Spanish-speaking populations, such as the importance of video and Youtube.

Prototyping Process

Cycle 1: Wide-Ranging Prototypes

Based off of the background research, we made and evaluated an initial set of lo-fi prototypes, ranging widely in form and audience:

• Zine: Hybrid booklets/fliers advertising specific Instituto programs.
  • The in-person idea was cool, but Instituto would benefit more from a more visible online presence.
• YouTube Series: Instituto OpenCourseWare.
  • This concept led to more questions than additional ideas.
• Success Story Form: an internal form on the website to send to instructors periodically, or fill out with clients at Instituto events.
  • This idea was seen as a potentially useful tool that the organization’s IT team could carry on with.
• Success Story Website Section: an easily accessible portion of the website for community members to see stories showing the range of programs and participants at Insituto.
  • We selected this idea as something worth building out regardless of the form that the main project idea would take. For example, stories from a social media campaign could be adapted to fit in the Instituto website.
• Social Media Campaign: #learningAcrossGenerations, #institutoFamily, and  #BiggestChangeIn4Words
  • We selected this as the main idea to pursue with this project. We liked the ideas that focused on community and mutual support.

Cycle 2: Social Media Campaign Prototypes

Based off of the results of the previous cycle, we focused this cycle on social media campaign prototypes. We started off with more background research on social media campaigns that seemed particularly relevant to the tone we wanted to achieve:

• Shout Your Abortion
  • Interesting as an example of a hashtag and campaign name that give you all the instructions you really need to know to participate
• Run As You Are
  • Interesting as a way of uniting people with a variety of different life experiences under the same umbrella
• Write for Rights
  • Interesting as an example of storytelling online
• FEED Supper
  • Interesting as an example of an in-person group activity, scaffolded through a social media campaign

Then, we developed 4 social media campaign prototypes that spoke to community support, friends celebrating each other, and intergenerational dynamics. We arranged a feedback session with people from various arms of Instituto, including instructors, a social worker, and a high school student. Their feedback focused on the need to be inclusive of all of the programs at Instituto if we were going to launch a single campaign. For example, though we wanted to highlight intergenerational touchpoints with Instituto, it is important to keep in mind that not all students will have that exact kind of support network. Their feedback also focused much more on a centralized social media campaign, rather than one approached as decentralized and openly participatory. Finally, feedback session participants were eager to help connect us with more high school students who could help provide feedback on the next round of ideas.

During this period, we also worked on fleshing out a new section of the website that would allow stories to be viewed by program, without cluttering up the main navigation. This required some trial and error in working with Instituto’s website platform and content management system. We received all-around positive feedback on this part of the project.

Final Prototypes, Beginning of Cycle 3

Website Section

Figure 2: Success Stories website section.

This website section is effectively ready to go, waiting for content to fill it with. We can include English and Spanish translations pretty easily on each page. We may run into more hiccups as we try to update each section, but it is good for our purposes now.

Social Media Campaign

Figure 3: Prototype Mock-ups resulting from cycle 2 of development, serving as the starting point for cycle 3.

None of these prototypes is exactly what we’re looking for, but we’re at the point now that we are ready to get feedback directly from community members that Insituto serves. The overwhelming feeling at the table was that this is a necessary next step that we are ready for.

Next Cycle

The next cycle of development for this project will start with feedback sessions with high school students on the final prototypes as seen in Figure 3. There are plans to present the project at the next board meeting in the summer. Overall, other people working at Instituto are very enthusiastic about the project and about the partnership developing with Instituto.

Although this process did not produce a set of tangible outputs that Insituto can immediately use, it did enable a lot of co-learning and a lot of relationship building. In the context of a population that has a strained relationship with teams coming from high profile universities, this is an incredibly important outcome that must precede the kind of work we’re still looking forward too, e.g. direct community outreach.

Reflection and Next Steps

Sam’s Reflections:

The feedback session with the staff highlighted some key factors to keep in mind as we move forward with this project: people responded well to the aspects of the images and captions that portrayed an image of mutual support. The feedback focused on the campaign as something centralized, though our mockups were focused on how people might participate in a social media campaign on their own. We will emphasize this aspect of the campaign and focus more on how we would fit specific event photographs into a story-sharing format through our social media campaign ideas. Overall, the people around the table saw the ideas as workable, and were excited to get the ideas in front of students in various programs, which will be our next step. I think this internal process and context-setting for the project was an important part of not just rushing through a design project without regard for the local culture at the partner institution. Context setting was very important within the context of the meeting, and I was glad the people at the table were able to get a better idea of where I am coming from and how Bonnie and I are approaching this project as something that will benefit everyone involved.

I’m excited to continue working on this project and strengthening my relationship with Instituto as I work on other media projects with them moving forward as well.

Bonnie’s Reflections

The feedback session with the staff was crucial to the success of this project. They provided valuable insights and criticisms that helped us restructure how we would present the project to future focus groups. Staff members were actively engaged and asked questions, in addition to requesting clarification as needed. Everyone at the table was invested in the success of this project and how it would raise awareness about Instituto in the future.

Overall, the project has progressed in line with my expectations. We are in the ideal place to test how it will be received among focus groups and tweak it in line with their feedback. Working with Sam has been a pleasure and I feel very confident that it will be well received as we fine tune it over the next couple of months.

The Hacking the Archives project is an ongoing collaboration between MIT students, MIT faculty, and several community partner organizations. Its aim is twofold. The first goal is to co-design a hackathon bringing these organizations together with each other, with archivists, with MIT affiliates, and with local youths and community members. This hackathon took place in May 2019. The second goal, currently in progress, is to continue several of those projects over the summer in engagement with local youth. This paper represents a case study from the perspective of two co-designers, Annie Wang and Ben Silverman, reflecting on the background and process of putting together the Hacking the Archives hackathon, primarily through their collaboration with the community organization METCO, Inc.

Link to case study: Here

Link to slide deck: Here