About

Join us for the 2016 multi-city San Francisco Bay Area Code for the Kingdom hackathon. Together with local organizers in San Francisco, Fremont, and Palo Alto and partner organizations we share a common vision to provide more opportunities for communities around the world to participate and showcase innovation and entrepreneurship in their communities in creating technologies addressing significant issues confronting society, community, families, and spiritual life.

The fourth San Francisco Bay Area Code for the Kingdom hackahton builds upon the success of the 2013, 2014, and 2015 Bay Area Code for the Kingdom hackathons, as well as the 2015 Global hackathon and previous regional hackathons, which have already gathered over 3500 technologists to create over 330 projects to do good. This largest ever global faith-inspired tech collaboration will continue to activate technologists and other creative people to give their skills and some time as their contribution to the mission field, and it will also leverage the skills and in- sights of entrepreneurs, designers, and technologists to foster an entrepreneurial culture with Christian values.

Come, participate and address a number of challenges aimed at helping release the oppressed, teaching God’s Word, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and supporting the church and the body of Christ.

Join us and let’s together create technology that matters.

Sponsors

Speakers

Meet the Speakers.

Henry Kaestner
Managing Partner, Sovereign's Capital
Fri Oct 23rd 8:15 pm

Henry Kaestner is the Managing Partner at Sovereign's Capital as well as the Chairman, Co-Founder and previous CEO of Bandwidth.com, a company that together with his business partner, David Morken, he has grown from $0 to $200 million in revenue. The values of Bandwidth.com have always been: Faith, Family, Work and Fitness (in that order). Bandwidth.com was the 4th fastest growing privately held company in the country from 2003 through 2007, a position it achieved without acquisition or institutional funding. Prior to co-founding Bandwidth.com Mr. Kaestner founded Chapel Hill Brokers (a predecessor to ICAP Energy), an institutional energy derivatives broker that became the top ranked electricity broker in the country. Mr. Kaestner has also been involved in a number of ministry and philanthropic activities. He co-founded and serves as Chairman of the Board of DurhamCares, and sits on the Board of Visitors at both the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the North Carolina Central University School of Business. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Kimberley and their three sons.

Yu-kai Chou
Gamification Pioneer & Serial Entrepreneur
Sat Oct 24th 11:00 am

Yu-kai Chou is the Original Creator of the gamification framework: Octalysis, and the author of Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. He is the Founder of The Octalysis Group and has been a regular speaker/lecturer on gamification worldwide, including at organizations like Google, Stanford University, LEGO, TEDx, SxSW, Gamified India, Huawei, the Innovation Center in Denmark, Kingdom of Bahrain, and many more. Yu-kai was one of the earliest pioneers in Gamification, starting his work in the industry in 2003. In 2015, Yu-kai was rated #1 among the “Gamification Gurus Power 100” by RISE, and was also awarded “Gamification Guru of the Year Award” for both 2014 and 2015 by the World Gamification Congress based in Europe. He has helped a variety of companies, from seed stage startups to Fortune 500 companies such as LEGO, Accenture, eBay, Huawei, Fidelity, AIG Japan, Verizon, HP, Ericsson, Cisco, Wells Fargo, and more. His work has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The World Journal, Business Insider, PBS, and many more.

Schedule

Meet with Mentors is a great opportunity to connect with industry experts who can guide you and your concepts. The organizers will help you connect with mentors of your choice on Friday/Saturday.

Challenges

Here are the challenges to get you started. Please remember that more challenges may be presented on the first day of the Hackathon.

In case you are already interested or working on a project, don’t change course. But please keep in mind that your project must be aligned with the spirit of the Hackathon. Please come prepared to pitch your project at the Hackathon so that you can recruit teams to work on them.

Advancing an inter-church Bay Area service culture

How can technology facilitate a Bay Area wide inter-church awareness and participation of mission trips, service opportunities, needs, and initiatives, while releasing Bay Area residents to engage and invite each other to come together in their shared passions and talents?

What if there were no barriers to how people in the Bay Area could participate in missions and service opportunities? We are not talking just of a way for churches to list their activities for other churches to know about but a way by which individuals, regardless of what church they attend or even if the attend church, can not only discover and register for those activities, but can also activate their own friends across the Bay Area to participate and organize inter-church activities.

Create technology to strengthen and increase the reach of churches in the Bay Area.

Champions

Foster Families

How can we leverage technology to help provide a loving home for every child in the Bay Area by facilitating a support team structure for foster families?

Caring for children in the foster system is a powerful way to pro-actively address issues like homelessness, drug abuse, human trafficking, prostitution, and teen pregnancy.

Foster parents face difficult challenges on a daily basis. Children in foster care often come from traumatic experiences, including physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. On top of dealing with the trauma, gaining trust, providing at home health care, helping with the education and the recovery of the child, foster parents have to deal with babysitting, transportation, meals, housekeeping, court, social workers, and the spiritual wellbeing of a child in foster care. The burden on new foster parents is often overwhelming.

By helping unburden foster parents, support teams improve their lives and free them to give greater focus to the needs of their family, improving the chances of the foster child to adjust, recover, and grow healthier in a loving family.

Could you create technology to help reduce the burden and stress on foster parents by encouraging a culture of support for foster families? By doing this you could help remove some of the barriers that prevent good people from becoming foster parents.

Champions

24/7 Prayer and Worship Movement

How can we activate 24/7 prayer and worship in the Bay Area so 21st century believers would pray more often and deeper?

Both Prayer and Worship is at the center of our relationship with God. It is our means of communication with Him, it strengthens us as believers and as community, and it is how we seek for what God wants for us to do. While food, water, and air sustain life, Prayer and Worship sustains our spiritual life.

As Christians we are asked to never stop praying and we are increasingly being called to choose worship as a way of life. Yet, the busy lifestyle created by the rapid diffusion of digital technologies like mobile phones, social networking sites, and the Internet is resulting in an ever busy lifestyle that significantly distracts us away from these two critical aspects of relationship with God. But what if we could use the very same technologies to encourage a more dynamic relationship with Him via worship and prayer?

How can technology connect, equip, encourage and care for those who want to be a part of the 24/7 Prayer Movement community at Convergence House of Prayer and regional transformational opportunities in the Bay Area?

How can technology help the 24/7 prayer room movement go viral, with millions of people creating virtual prayers rooms, inviting their friends, family and neighbors while connecting with the entire House of Prayer movement?

Build technologies that activate, inform, and grow the 24/7 prayer community.

Create solutions to mobilize 24/7 prayer and worship for ministries, schools, neighborhoods, friends, families.

Leverage technology to discover and respond to how God is moving in the 24/7 prayer community in the Bay Area, the nation and across the globe.

Champions

The TBC Challenge. Better Decision Support technology to Transform the Bay Area With Christ

Help complete the project started at last year’s hackathon and help TBC measure, track, and show growth of the countless churches and faith organizations impacting the Bay Area.

Transforming the Bay with Christ (TBC) is leading a coalition of business leaders, venture capitalists, pastors, and non-profit leaders, to activate a grass roots movement that will transform the Bay Area through social compassion and service.

As Peter Drucker wisely wrote: “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it”, how can we meet the needs of the Bay Area if we do not clearly understand what ministries are doing, where they are doing it and what the gaps are? TBC wants to help solve that issue with your help.

At the 2015 Bay Area Code for the Kingdom hackathon, TBC challenged participants to help create technology by which to map and track the needs of schools in the Bay Area and the opportunity for Bay Area churches and non-profits to help meet those needs. A team came together at the hackathon to work on this challenge, and the team has continued since then to work with TBC.

The original challenge has since been expanded to go beyond mapping what is happening with schools. Instead, we should understand all that ministries are doing and the needs of the entire Bay Area.

Join with the team that started at last year’s hackathon, and help this vision become a reality.

Champions

The Bible and social issues

How can technology help connect the Bible to today's relevant social issues (i.e. homelessness, racial reconciliation, divorce, poverty, etc.)?

DJ Chuang .BIBLE Registry Manager at American Bible Society challenges you in this video to create relevant technologies to leverage the Bible to tackle issues confronting our society.

.BIBLE, will be awarding a special price for the best Bible innovation during the hackathon: a premium .BIBLE domain name of a value up to $10,000.

Champions

From YouVersion, Interfacing with the Bible in the Future

How can you leverage technologies such as Voice, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Chat Box, and others to deliver better and even more relevant interactions with the Bible?

Terry Storch, co-founder of the YouVersion Bible Apps, challenges you in this video to innovate a great new way to interact with the Bible

What would it look like if you would talk to the bible? How would someone who does not believe the Bible is real or does not know the Bible talk to the Bible? How can the Bible interface with them in a real life conversation? What would it be like if the Bible talks back with him?

How would AI interface with the Bible and deliver the search with my innermost need?

What would the Bible look like in a chat box environment?

Champions

Awards

A panel of judges will select awards in multiple categories.

• Best Overall started at the hackathons
• Best Overall started before the hackathons
• Lunch with Henry Kastener, Managing Partner of Sovereigns Capital, Yu-kai Chou, Gamification Author and Josh Kwan, founder of Praxis Labs.
• .Bible special award

Local Organizers

Meet your Local Organizers.

Marc Krejci
Pastor of Innovation, Venture Christian Church

Marc Krejci came up through the music industry, tripped over entrepreneurship, and became a pastor after establishing himself in the world of technology. Passionate about making the invisible, visible; and the impossible seem possible, he finds joy serving the one true King, pursuing epic outdoor adventures, and developing ecosystems of innovation. Recently he and his family finished their eleven-year chapter in Nashville and moved to Silicon Valley where he joined Venture Christian Church as their newly formed Pastor of Innovation.

Nicole Dickens
Consultant, Agylytyx

Nicole Dickens has over 15 years of Fortune 100 experience in financial management, strategic planning, new product introductions, global treasury and trade credit risk management. She has developed high functioning teams in both spin-off and merger environments, and successfully executed the implementation of business process and controls. Currently consulting on business development with a SaaS Business Intelligence start-up.

Zaquis Ross
Digital Project Coordinator, Venture Christian Church

San Francisco Mentors

Cindy Kim
User Experience Researcher, Crunchyroll

Cindy's interest lies in the intersection between technology and human psychology. She is specifically interested in incorporating psychological insights from behavioral decision research into user-centered product development.

DJ Chuang
.BIBLE Registry Manager at American Bible Society

DJ Chuang is a strategy consultant, currently working with the .BIBLE Registry, a new top-level domain for all things Bible. He's known for his expertise in the space of church, social media, and innovations.

Jonathan Chen
Senior Growth Manager, FiveStars

Neil Ahlsten
Co-Founder and CEO, Carpenter's Code

Neil has a passion for innovation that serves the Gospel. Neil is Co-Founder/CEO of Carpenters Code, which has built Abide, an iPhone app for praying together. Neil is on leave from Google, where he spent six years managing business development for vertical ads, launching access and mobile projects in Africa, and a variety of other roles. Before Google, Neil was the Darfur / Chad refugee program manager for the U.S. Department of State, and served in hotspots across Africa for Food for the Hungry and the World Bank.

Ross Overline
Product Marketing Manager, FiveStars

Sam Park
Director of engineering, Crazy Love Ministries

Sam is the director of engineering at Crazy Love Ministries. He leads a group of very talented believers to create ReadScripture, a Bible reading app. Before joining Crazy Love, Sam held positions at Netflix, Google, and number of start-ups as an UI engineer.

Fremont Mentors

Alain Ayoub
Engineering Manager, Google

Alain is a software engineering manager at Google working on bringing fast Internet access to everyone in the world. He is the co-founder of OnHub, a wireless router for the connected home and also worked on Google social networking infrastructure and built software to connect Google's data centers. Prior to Google, Alain held engineering positions at Symantec, Pillar Data Systems, and Maxtor.

DJ Chuang
.BIBLE Registry Manager at American Bible Society

DJ Chuang is a strategy consultant, currently working with the .BIBLE Registry, a new top-level domain for all things Bible. He's known for his expertise in the space of church, social media, and innovations.

Gina Hyatt
Associate Pastor, Convergence House of Prayer

Pastor Gina is the Senior Administrator at Convergence House of Prayer, where she oversees/manages staff, events, and volunteers. Some of the roles she plays on a regular basis are Executive Producer, Interpersonal Communications, Pastoral Counseling, and Staff Mentoring. She is also the Connections Pastor at Convergence House of Prayer, developing processes for and assimilating new members to volunteer positions in the local church, regional prayer room, and regional ministries we network with.

Chris Armas
Founder/ Managing Director, Code for the Kingdom

Chris Armas leads the Code for the Kingdom Initiative globally. Chris is a consummate business and technology thought leader. Chris has been a global technology entrepreneur having launched two successful startups, as well as being CIO/CTO at Fortune 500 companies. Chris focus now is to help engage, challenge, release, and support the most brilliant minds of the entrepreneurial and tech sector to create technologies that would affect our communities and culture from a Christian perspective.

Palo Alto Mentors

DJ Chuang
.BIBLE Registry Manager at American Bible Society

DJ Chuang is a strategy consultant, currently working with the .BIBLE Registry, a new top-level domain for all things Bible. He's known for his expertise in the space of church, social media, and innovations.

Joe Kumar
Data Engineer, Facebook

Kent Shaffer
Founder, Open Church

Kent Shaffer lives in an RV with his wife and 2 kids. It's part of his work with Open Church - an initiative to help disciples of Jesus collaborate, learn from each other, and share resources. At the core of this collaborative ecosystem is a free, global library of digital content and tools. He also co-founded a design and marketing firm, launched and sold a few tech startups, and gave strategic counsel to groups such as LifeChurch.tv, Saddleback Church, charity: water, Leadership Network, and OneHope. He writes at ChurchRelevance.com about the intersection of theology and methodology - what we do vs what Christ said. His ministry roots began as a missionary’s kid in Peru and evolved into 10+ years of youth and children’s ministry at Church on the Move, LifeChurch.tv, and Frontline Church.

Matthew Chan
Full stack developer, Crazy Love Ministries

Full stack developer working on the ReadScripture app with Crazy Love Ministries in foggy San Francisco. Loves the intersection of faith and technology, and wants to see a movement of believers serving the Kingdom with their first fruits.

Policarpo Wood
Design Manager UI, iTunes Engineering

APIs

At Code For The Kingdom, we value your precious time and don’t want you to reinvent the wheel. That’s why our friends have come forward to offer their APIs, in order to enable you to build better and faster. That said, please note that there is no compulsion that these APIs must be used or any other restrictions on technologies that you may use at the Hackathon.

We believe that these platforms may assist you as you create effective solutions to today’s problems. So leverage these APIs and the best resources around so that together, we can create technology that matters.

Access digital Bible content in hundreds of languages. Free.

Easy access to Bible text, audio, and videos with simple API calls to the Digital Bible Platform. Become one of the few developers to provide Deaf Bible videos in your app.

Help Faith Comes By Hearing enhance the Digital Bible Platform for the developer community. Provide your feedback and in turn support enhancements for your apps.

During the hackathon, this username and key will be active so developers can immediately use the API. If you want to continue using the API after the event you can sign up for your own key.

• Username: [email protected]
• Password: kg4Al!4Hn0
• Login URL: https://www.digitalbibleplatform.com/site/wp-login.php
• DBT Key: 606e196e1e72786b3f54eb4c71fcb321

Biblia.com and Faithlife.com API.

Biblia.com API

http://api.biblia.com/docs/

The Biblia.com API provides access to information about available Bibles (Find, Image), access to text in those Bibles (Content), and the ability to find content within those Bibles (Search). Additional services support validating Bible references (Parse), comparing Bible references (Compare), and finding Bible references in text and HTML (Scan, Tag).

Faithlife.com API

https://developer.faithlife.com/

The Faithlife API provides Community and Accounts functionality. The Accounts API encompasses user and group data, such as a user’s role in a group or what groups a user is a member of, while the Community API encompasses all social interaction between accounts, such as messaging and commenting.

• If you plan to use both APIs, you’ll have to register with each independently.

Rules

Why the rules?

The rules are in place to give every participant the same opportunity for success. In order to be eligible for the prizes, participants must follow the rules. However, if you want to participate and not follow the rules below, you will be permitted to do so, although you will not be eligible for the prizes.

Importantly, you can start coding ahead of the hackathon or at the hackathon. So what are you waiting for? Register now and get started!

Read the rules

You can start coding ahead of the hackathon or at the hackathon.

USE WHAT YOU KNOW

Participants are free to use any tools that they know, in order to help them code.

CODING RULES

There will be identical but separate awards for teams that started coding before the hackathon as well as teams that started coding at the hackathon. However, some or all of the coding must take place at the hackathon, in order to be eligible for the awards.

TRY TO USE AVAILABLE ’S API’S

Although not mandatory, participants are encouraged to use our available APIs.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Participants have full ownership of what they build during the Code for the Kingdom hackathon and are free to do with it as they wish. If you build as a team, the IP is shared by the team. If you build as an individual, the IP is all yours.

FINISH ON TIME

Participant must submit their project by the submission time on Sunday afternoon. No late submissions will be accepted.

Parking Information

Parking is on a first come first served basis.

• San Francisco. FIVESTARS. There are 15 spaces in the front parking lot in the alleyway on the far side of the office about 30 spaces, far side as you head to 1st st from 2nd. Please do not park in the fenced-in lot, as that belongs to Cal-Train. There's also pay street parking all around and a number of daily lots in the area.

• Palo Alto. Mixbooks.com. Park in the parking lot across the street from the Mixbooks.com office building, parking is free.

• Fremont. Convergence House of Prayer. Park in the Convergence House of Prayer parking lot. Parking is free

Be a Sponsor

Our community is committed to connecting incredible innovators with the Church, organizations, investors, and initiatives that need their talent. God has given us talents and gifts for the good of the larger Body - so together we can accomplish what He wants to do through us. You and your gifts are vital to help extend this ecosystem into your ministry, industry or community.

Code for the Kingdom is looking for sponsors at all levels to support the program financially and contribute company resources, mentorship, and expertise to ensure the success of the San Francisco Bay Area Code for the Kingdom Global Hackathon. We will work closely with major sponsors to ensure you receive sponsorship benefits that support your core objectives.

If you are interested in exploring sponsorship opportunities for 2016 San Francisco Bay Area Code for the Kingdom hackathon, contact us!