Hackathons to Save the Planet

On Nov. 9, 40 software developers convened at the San Francisco office of design firm Ideo to take part in a Silicon Valley ritual called a hackathon. During the eight-hour coding session, engineers fueled by pizza and beer tapped away on laptops, while designers scrawled plans on whiteboards. This wasn’t a crash project to develop the next killer app. It was Hack Sanitation, a quest to help educate people in Ghana about the public health risks posed by the nation’s bathroom shortage.

After visiting the West African nation two years ago, Jocelyn Wyatt, the executive director for Ideo’s nonprofit arm Ideo.org, organized the hackathon to develop software that would let people in the city of Kumasi report public sightings of human waste via text message or Facebook, then create digital maps to identify risky locations.