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The Official Logo for Open Hall
Inspiration
We've all taught our parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, neighbors, etc. some tech skills, right? In this information age, understanding how to utilize the technology available to us is critical. Just as critical is getting the younger generation to get involved in their communities and local governments. This is our solution to bridging the gap between tech-savy students and high-quality citizenship. "Open Hall" - a combination of "Open Source" and "Town Hall."
What it does
Provides a community service program that pairs students with adults/senior citizens in communities to either assist in teaching tech or teach full courses to groups. The adults involved in the program then provide mentorship to the students in the realm of local government and their roles as active citizens in a community. Additionally, for each town, a digital "town hall" web page is generated. The web page is managed by a open hall council comprised of a few students and the town council. The page displays a community calendar, announcements, topics, town council contact info, and more. Citizens in the community can link their devices, such as the Amazon Echo or Pebble Watch, to their digital town hall so they can ask "Alexa, when is the next community event?" or receive a notification on their watch when the next town meeting is. The Open Hall website hosts any community signed up for the program. For example: open-hall.com/me/vanburen would host the town hall for Van Buren, ME. Information about the community service tech/citizenship programs would also be available on each town hall page.
How I built it
Our network master, Dalton, created a server for our site using AWS. We utilized some HTML 5 templates and Microsoft Expression to create the mock-up website. Additionally, Dalton created a network for our Amazon Echo to connect to so we could test its functionality and see if we could program it. Matt created some documentation and conducted research, as well as collaborated with Nic on the design process - creating the project structure, logo, website layout, and so on.
Challenges I ran into
Unfortunately, our project was not really completed. The mock-site had minimal functionality due to some challenges we faced with setting up the server and accessing the network. After some consideration, we decided to conclude our project early and see if we could assist any of the other teams. So: open-hall.com was not actually created for our project, unfortunately, and we do not have a complete presentation or anything to demo other than our idea on paper.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Despite our numerous challenges/incomplete projects, we had a lot of fun! Dalton is proud to have learned a lot about how to use AWS and more about network setups. Matt and Nic are proud of their design and conceptual achievements, as well as their involvement in the other activities present at the event. We didn't do that well, but we had a blast participating in our first Hackathon!
What I learned
A little bit of preparation wouldn't hurt! Going into this challenge without really knowing how a real hackathon works was a new experience for us, and it certainly showed. Additionally, having an idea of what route we should take in terms of the project (be it software, hardware, mechanical, etc.) beforehand, with the teammates we had, would be a good idea. Our technical experience in software for the scope of the project we were considering was not really there, which made it much more difficult to compete. Also, it was a long bus ride, so figuring out how we could sustain our energy for the competition was a learning process! Overall, we learned a lot about what a well-run hackathon looks like, and we hope to incorporate a lot of these takeaways into our own hackathon that we will be hosting in the Spring! (And we hope to partner with MLH!)
What's next for Open Hall – Hacking Citizenship
We really liked our concept, and we hope that we might return to it someday - maybe even do a pilot of it in a small community in Maine! It is definitely something we can carry with us to potentially work on right after school in a few years. Perhaps we'll have the skills necessary to achieve it by then!
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