Arizona
This page lists more specific details on the solutions developed for Opportunity Hack in Arizona.
Tons more detail is available on GitHub, including capstone projects, and a list of all non-profits we've worked with.
2022
ASU Senior Capstone & Honors Thesis Project
For both the Spring and Fall 2022 semester, we sought to improve upon a partially completed hackathon idea and wrote this proposal: Software, Take the Reins: Make Horse Scheduling go from Trot to Gallop. From there, we were paired with a team that included these students:
Students that are graduating with honors can supplement their capstone project with an additional thesis project, and in this case both Michael and Peter asked for an additional project. After a brainstorm of six potential projects, they selected an observability project that asked for frontend and backend monitoring to be added to their senior capstone codebase for Girard Training Stables.
This gave Opportunity Hack the chance to hypothesis test if a lack of college curriculum in SRE, monitoring, logging, and observability would prevent students from understanding and implementing something that is common within industry.
"We found that the frontend metrics were useful to non-technical users, with 70% of the users surveyed being able to correctly understand the data generated and theorize about parts of the website UI that could be improved based on said data.
We were also able to correctly catch and log 100% of the test errors that were generated, and send alerts to administrators if these errors led to system failure. Overall, we were able to significantly improve the observability of the Girard Training Stables scheduling tool by adding monitoring, making it more robust, scalable, and easy to improve for the future."
After reviewing their thesis submission, it's clear that core concepts of SRE have been learned within a short timespan (one semester is roughly 3 months, balanced between life, work, and other coursework).
Adding Observability to the Girard Training Stables Scheduling Tool_Fall_2022.pdf
1st Place
$1,000 upfront & $5,000 upon completionTrevor Moore, Carter Rice, Jordan Riley
Non-profit: Zuri's Circle
A challenge that Zuri's Circle faced was gathering and managing emails at volunteer or regular events - their process involved participants writing down their contact information by hand. This introduced problems with deciphering the contact info and proved to be ineffective. As a result, they were looking for a way to easily track and manage participant involvement in order to keep in contact with and retain their donors, recipients, and volunteers.
2nd Place
$800 upfront & $3,000 upon completionJacob Omaits, Ty Garside, Matt Walker
Non-profit: Chandler Care Center
Chandler CARE Center quite literally had a data problem. In 2018, they served 4,000 families (15,000 individuals), but relied on outdated database structures and entry. Entirely too much time was spent on data entry and report generation. We built a unified solution that relies on a single PostgresSQL database as the source of truth for all services, members and reporting. Utilizing a lightweight, cloud-based REST API, we're able to quickly and efficiently add new members, modify existing members and generate customized reports.
3rd Place
Phoenix Suns Ultimate Fan Experience upfront and $1,600 upon completionRushabh Shah, Taylor Rosby, Charinee Chantarasak, Allyson Meyer, Jamie Reichenberger
Non-profit: Real-Time STEAM
We were inspired by RealTimeSteam's (RTS) mission to educate adults with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, by bridging the gap between pop culture and STEM. RTS is currently spending loads of time manually researching for pop culture events and related STEM research in order to find content for educational presents at large conferences, such as Phoenix Fan Fusion (formerly Phoenix Comic Con). After researching existing solutions and brainstorming together, we found there is a missing hole in research tools to find the intersection between STEM and trending pop culture. It has taken RTS 3 months to crawl through all the data manually! We can increase efficiency, accuracy, precision, and time management for research for all non-profits, educational platforms, and specialized research.
Tech Talent South & Phoenix Suns Prize
Phoenix Suns Premium Fan Experience upfront & $6,750 value in Tech Talent South courses upon completionIshan Kumar Sarangi, Kalyan, Utkarsh Agarwal, Kirti Jha, Sabyasachi Mohanty
Non-profit: Zuri's Circle
The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was built keeping in mind the most required features for the NPO like managing volunteers, sending out mails about registration. Information about every event added to all volunteers and accepting confirmation. The payment application on iOs bring convenience to the finger tips of the donors. The NPO wanted receipt generation for donors to help them with their tax filings.
Keap Prize
$1,000 upon completionGokulan Vikash Babu, Zachary Alvarez, Srihari Ravi, Nithish Moudhgalya, Raghavendhar Thiruvoipadi Vidyasagar
Non-profit: Chandler Care Center
Katie with her fellow mates work at a community service named the Chandler care center, where they provide community services for needy people for little or no cost. They provide various services that include medical, shelter, food and so on. The saddest thing is that they do not have an application or a software that would help them do their daily work. All they have had so far is an Access database in which they work directly on. They enroll newcomers or record their visits manually in the database. Also, the user has to fill a pen and paper based form every time he/she visits chandler care center. Then, the staff uses the form to key in the details to the DB. Also, the Access DB has a single point of entry and only one person can log in and enter the data in the DB at one time. So, no matter how many staff they have, only one person's info can be fed into the system at a time. We wanted to build an application that can help them reduce their workload and their frustration that might arise due to this tedious and long process.
2018
October 20th and 21st
Galvanize, Phoenix
Keynote: Maria Luna, CoFounder and CEO, BRAVO Tip or Pay
Sponsors: Galvanize, PayPal, GoDaddy, InfusionSoft, REPAY, Splunk
We introduced a new prize methodology in 2018 where we withhold 80% of the prize money until the projects are completed as part of a Statement of Work (SOW) prize.
1st Place
$1,000 upfront & $5,000 upon completionMark Omo, James Rowley
Non-Profit: Matthew's Crossing Food Bank
We've been to many hackathons, but none are quite as rewarding as Opportunity Hack. The prospect of spending a weekend working hard, eating well, honing our technical skills, and at the same time giving back to the community in a meaningful way just by doing what we love is incredible. This is our second year participating in the Arizona PayPal Opportunity Hack, and also our second time working with Matthew's Crossing Food Bank. Once again, they've sweetened the deal by coming to the table with a well-defined problem for which we can develop an effective solution, helping us ensure not a minute is wasted in these short 28 hours. Contributing our skills to those in need is a great feeling, as is creating a solution that reduces the manual effort required for a business process, and with Matthew's Crossing Data Manager we're proud to do both. Our solution, Matthew's Crossing Data Manager (MCDM), works in conjunction with their main system, Food Bank Manager in order to ingest the donation and guest data, automatically classify it, and generate meaningful reports that Matthew's Crossing can make use of to directly improve their service.
2nd Place
$1,000 upfront & $4,000 upon completionChristian Taillon, Joshua Lee, Tom Fowler, Thomas Gleason
Non-Profits: NMTSA, RealTimeSteam, Animals and Humans in Disaster
Nonprofits had difficulties collecting data from surveys. They performed a lot of manual data entry. This is a full stack application running out of one docker container with a front and back end that can create forms that can then be filled out, scanned, and submitted parsed by the application. It will then be stored in a MySQL database. Data can be imported and exported as csv files.
3rd Place
$100 upfront & $2,000 upon completionJames Quigley, Chuck Dries, Joshua Hewlett
Non-profit: Children's Cancer Network
Busy nonprofit administrators waste their valuable time copy pasting text messages on their phones, reducing the amount of good they're able to do. This application takes a CSV of contact info, a handful of messages, and sends them out! It also collects responses into CSVs. Our flow is centered entirely around CSV so, instead of implementing a user management system the administrator would have to learn and keep up to date, we take a CSV every time so the administrator can stick to the tools they already know for user management.
Splunk Impact Prize
Tech giftSabyasachi Mohanty, Utkarsh Agarwal, Ishan Kumar Sarangi, Kalyan
With Nonprofits feeding a lot of people every day becomes a lot of problems because there's a lot of manual work that needs to be done. It's our way of contributing to society be helping make their lives easier so that they can put more of their effort in managing. This application automates the process of managing inventory which is a very tedious job and is prone to human error while doing paper works. It reduces around 5-6 hours of their per month work. So, rather than sifting through loads of data the user can just upload the file through the user interface and see the results on the dashboard and also download a CSV file which gives the user all the aggregated reports for the months.
InfusionSoft Keeping it Simple SE
$1000 upfrontElijah Abella, Josh Mcguigan, Chelsea Tompkins, Nhan Ph
One of the most valuable resources that a Non Profit Organization has would be their volunteers. We wanted to create an application that NPOs could use that would allow a seamless way to communicate with their volunteers, as well as a way to more accurately track attendance for volunteer events using an individual's volunteer history. Volunteer Shepherd has a user view that allows individuals to volunteer for upcoming events. An admin view shows detailed information for events that indicates the projected number of volunteers that will be in attendance for the event. Confirmation texts are automatically sent out 7 and 3 days prior to the event prompting the volunteer to confirm if they would be attending still, and updating the DB accordingly. If 2 days prior to the event, the desired number of volunteers hasn't been met, a solicitation will be sent out to prior volunteers to sign up for the event if available.