This weekend’s Philadelphia Social Justice Hackathon is a problem-solving sprint

As organizers of Philadelphia’s Social Justice Hackathon began contacting community organizations about the event, they asked each group about the problems they face and how technology could possibly solve them. In response, the community organizations didn’t ask for any groundbreaking technology to be built. They wanted automation and ease.

Insiyah Jamal, one of the event’s lead organizers, said that someone with Community Legal Services, which provides free civil legal assistance to low-income Philadelphians, told her, “If you automate part of our process, it could end up letting us serve double the people we are able to serve today — just by making these forms for us.”

Jamal said that while this hackathon might not produce exciting things like “state-of-the-art technology or robotics ... the impact that you can make is exciting.”

Beginning Friday night, a hundred law students, programmers, lawyers, and other community advocates will come together to build technology solutions on behalf of several Philadelphia community organizations and the people they work with.

The 36-hour event kicks off at the Quorum Event Space before moving to Drexel University’s Kline School of Law on Saturday and Sunday. The hackathon is also hosted by Penn, Villanova, and Temple’s law schools, as well as a few civic-minded coding groups — Code for Philly, R-Ladies Philly, and the Philadelphia chapter of Legal Hackers.

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In traditional hackathon style, the event participants will split off into smaller teams to build a solution to one of the event’s listed challenges, which were generated by partnering community organizations. Participants may also pitch their own challenges and solutions. Each team will have a balance of law students, coders, and advocates, and will work with mentors from the community organizations to help ensure that the solutions are informed by the needs of the people that the solutions will ultimately serve.

While civic-minded hackathons are common, the Social Justice Hackathon’s focus on working closely with community organizations makes it stand out. “Other hackathons ... can be thinking about a problem in really abstract terms and still say that it’s a hackathon‚” said Laura Bingham, one of the event organizers and the executive director of Temple University’s Institute for Law, Innovation & Technology. “But with the focus on access to justice and legal services and being really grounded in the community and the people who are doing the work every day, I think it is much more meaningful.”

Community Legal Services is one of the event’s key hosts and partners. Most of the hackathon challenges were generated on behalf of CLS, in an effort to solve some of the challenges that the organization’s attorneys and advocates encounter with clients. For example, some of its challenges ask participants to build a better tool for calculating SNAP benefits for CLS clients, or to create a more streamlined application for criminal-record pardons.

“We don’t have the time, and in a lot of cases, we also don’t have the expertise to implement some of these ideas,” said Nate Vogel, director of law and technology with CLS. “So an event like this hackathon is really exciting for us because we have an opportunity to get these ideas we have ... in front of a whole bunch of really talented volunteers [with that expertise].”

Other organizations involved with the event include groups like the Merchants Fund, a foundation that provides assistance to small-business owners, and the Newcomer Immigrant Youth Learning Collaborative, a nonprofit that helps connect new immigrants and their families with proper care and resources. The challenges issued by each of these organizations ask for ways to make online resources and forms more accessible, understandable, and simplified for the community members they work with.

“I hope other people don’t feel scared away by this notion of a hackathon,” said Julie McIntyre, one of the community mentors who works with NIYLC and its facilitating nonprofit, La Puerta Abierta. . “Even if they are doing more community-facing work, there’s really valuable things they could contribute.”

Building lasting solutions is on everyone’s mind. Sometimes, hackathons have been criticized because the brainstorming and furious work doesn’t always result in meaningful end products. That’s why the organizers of this Social Justice Hackathon have stressed that the tools built here must be ones that the community organizations can easily implement and maintain going forward.

“[The solutions are] meant to be very sustainable,” said Amy Emerson, an associate dean and associate professor at Villanova’s Charles Widger School of Law.

To that end, those involved with the hackathon don’t realistically expect that participants will construct final products over the sprint of the weekend. The idea is to build prototypes that they will continue to improve over time. “If we can get expert attorneys using the prototype and refining it, then we’re a lot closer to something that could someday be ... [used by] the public,” Vogel said. The event organizers also pointed to the partnerships with the law schools as a way of incubating the projects and making sure they continue to develop even as students and other hackers move on.

There is a common understanding that these 36 hours of work are meant to be just the start of providing better services and resources to community members.

“This is not like — we all come together for a weekend and then we disperse and go our separate ways,” Emerson said. “The goal is that everyone’s invested in making this a long-term solution and continuing to build it out after the weekend wraps up.”