by Al Porotesano

I’m going to Long Beach at the ACT Day: A day of hacking against homelessness this weekend. It’s mission is a collaboration of coders, designers, idealists and participants to solve a problem statement presented at the hackathon.

Unlike competitive hackathons, this is a barn-raising project where teams work with other teams. This takes a different take as a hackaton to finish several goals to complete the mission.

With that in mind, I’m going to make a lot of questions:

  • Would I build a scanning system and put it in the homeless mission’s openERP app in the cloud? I’d have no hesitation to download the SDK and incorporate it.
  • Should I propose an anonymous social system for the homeless to find shelters and food banks? Absolutely.
  • Can I use augmented reality to blend in our social networking of anonymous homeless with churches, food banks and shelters?
  • Can I use openERP for homeless shelters for fundraising projects via auctions and stuff?
  • What minimum infrastructure requirements should we set up for a homeless shelter to work in our cloud infrastructure? Android tablets and Phones with AWS?
  • Can we work with a network of homeless programs from the Harbor Regional Centers and the Veterans Administrations?

I may update this page with a lot of questions, but I’m pretty excited to work on the hack against homelessness project this weekend.

al