Winnipeg tech community “hacks” for a good cause

Eat, sleep, code, repeat.

That’s been the past 48 hours for roughly 30 volunteers in the tech sector as they build an app from scratch for a Winnipeg social enterprise.

Builder’s League: “Hackathons Changing the World” is a series of weekend work blitzes that produce custom software for organizations or groups that might not otherwise have the means to develop it. Their first weekend “hack-a-thon” took place Oct. 4-6.

Diogo Iwasaki is the co-founder of local tech startup Ori.Gatou Creative Solutions Inc., and organized the event. Students and industry professionals volunteered their time to code the app, with many spending the night at Tech Manitoba’s office and working into the night.

“We’re trying to help those places that maybe don’t have the resources, because apps are expensive!” Iwasaki said. “People are coming together, building, having meals, sleeping over and creating something magical over the weekend.”

That magical something is an app for The Community of Big Hearts, a local social enterprise that offers Truth and Reconciliation workshops to organizations across the country. The new app will deliver their “Road to Reconciliation Challenge,” an educational tool for organizations to learn about Truth and Reconciliation through an interactive platform where users learn together.

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“The Reconciliation Road Challenge is our initiative to make reconciliation a daily conversation,” said Salena Starling, President & CEO of the Community of Big Hearts. “We’re trying to make reconciliation more than just September.”

Starling met Iwasaki when they were seated next to each other at a business conference. Iwasaki already had the idea to hold a hack-a-thon for a good cause, but hadn’t yet found a group to work with.

“When we had the conversation and they told me that they wanted to build something that would benefit people, I had no idea what I wanted,” said Starling. “I knew that I wanted to scale the business in a way, but I didn’t think the impact would be an app.”

But after months of planning and organizing ahead of this weekend, Starling says the app has already garnered the interest of her clients.

“Right now, we have about 2000 Canadians that are signed on to the Reconciliation Road Challenge,” she said.

The hack-a-thon is also an opportunity for people in the tech sector to network and learn from each other. Sam Oyedeji is a student in RRC Polytech’s Full Stack Web Development program. He heard about the hack-a-thon from an instructor.

“It gives me the opportunity to actually have an idea of what it feels like when you work in an industry,” he said. “You only know a part of the whole, you can’t know the whole. So being able to build your own part so it can work and fit into what others are building is a skill you need as a developer.”

Most of the volunteers had never worked with each other before, and it was also the first hack-a-thon for many. But Iwasaki says it wasn’t difficult to find people to volunteer their time.

“The wonderful thing about the tech community in Winnipeg is, though we’re small, we’re really, really well connected,” he said.

The software for the app is open-source, meaning the code used to write it can be shared and modified. While the content of the app is proprietary, the app itself can be improved by anyone.

“It’s not just about supporting the tech community, really, it’s about helping the tech community support everybody else,” Iwasaki said.

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