Hackathon Overview

Philadelphia Social Justice Hackathon 2024 through the Responsible Computing Challenge program. The hackathon was held April 05 - 07, 2024 at Drexel’s Kline School of Law. More than 80 attendees comprised of students, programmers, “civic-minded hackers”, faculty, justice advocates, public servants, community legal providers, writers, story-tellers, and members of the Philly community came together to design creative solutions to respond to specific justice needs of Philly residents and neighborhoods most impacted by social, economic, and environmental injustices.

The event kicked off with an inspiring keynote by Pat De Carlo, followed by insightful challenge project presentations and team formation. Day 2 featured knowledge sharing by a variety of mentors on topics such as no-code A2J app development, ArcGIS, open source data visualization tools and selecting tech stacks. Seven enterprising teams then worked tirelessly over two days, and presented their solutions to an esteemed panel of judges: Miguel Willis, Future of the Profession Initiative at Penn Carey Law, Laura Bingham, iLIT at Temple Law, Ken Reiser, Temple Law and Shahana Farishta, Goldblum, Pollins and Dennis.

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Hackathon Winners

Notable projects included Stop Slumlords, a tool to combat bad actors and unethical practices in housing, My Blueprint Creator to help Philly students explore career pathways, set goals, and track progress over time, Judicial Bypasses to provide minors info to make informed decisions about their reproductive health care, and Rowhome Vibration Monitoring to enable residents to protect their homes from damage caused by nearby construction.

The social justice hackathon, founded by Miguel Willis when he was a student at Seattle University, is an on-going hackathon series co-hosted by all the law schools in Greater Philadelphia, civic and legal tech groups, and community legal providers. The organizing team includes representatives from Drexel's Thomas Kline School of Law, the Philadelphia Chapter of LegalHackers.org, Code for Philly, Future of the Profession Initiative at Penn Carey Law, iLIT at Temple's Beasley School of Law, Villanova's Charles Widger School of Law, and Community Legal Services of Philadelphia.

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