CodeRaising Boston is a 4-weekend hackathon bringing 8 teams of mentors and apprentices together to build cool nonprofit open-source software applications. Teams will meet at a venue to code each Saturday during the CodeRaising, with food and drinks provided. At the end of the CodeRaising, all 8 teams are expected to launch their applications to great fanfare.
Why CodeRaising? Because one-weekend hackathons are often too short to produce applications substantial enough to have an afterlife. The short deadlines also create too much stress to let any serious mentoring happen. We want to redress both of these shortcomings with CodeRaising.
The goals of CodeRaising are
- To give participants a fun, challenging software-building experience
- To help beginners learn by building real-world, hands-on projects
- To build neat and useful software
Eight teams of 5 members will be selected. Each team must consist of 2 mentors and 3 apprentices. Apprentices are beginners who may have some basic coding knowledge but don't yet have experience building a real application from scratch.
Teams can build their application with any language and framework they want. Projects must be useful to end users who are not coders, and they must be hosted on GitHub, not-for-profit, and open-source.
Mentors who want to propose projects and lead teams should write up a project proposal and send us a link by DATE. The proposal may be hosted on Google Docs or on GitHub as a Markdown file or gist. The proposal should describe the project to they propose to build during the 4-week CodeRaising, the languages and frameworks it will use, and some of the skills that beginners on the project can expect to learn.
CodeRaising organizers will then review the applications and select 8 for the CodeRaising on DATE.
The 8 teams then will have 1 week to design a logo and recruit the necessary team members.
Then the CodeRaising begins, meeting on Saturday, DATE, at LOCATION from TIME to TIME.
During the 4-week CodeRaising, teams are expected to meet at the VENUE on each Saturday. They are permitted to work on the project outside that time as well.
It's expected that some people may have to skip a Saturday CodeRaising session due to other plans and commitments. That is okay, as long as some team members show up at the venue.
Since part of the point of the CodeRaising is to mentor beginners, teams are expected to allow beginners to make significant contributions.
To serve this end, each team will host their codebase publicly on GitHub. Each project will be monitored and scored based partly on how much of the work is contributed by the beginners.
At the end of the CodeRaising, teams officially launch their projects. We will make sure to get some local tech new coverages for the projects post-launch.
Please edit this below; just a new idea ->
Out of all the code-raising projects, we will also select a winner and a runner up.
The winner will get 1 year of Heroku 2-dyno hosting. ??
The runner-up will get 6 months of Heroku 2-dyno hosting. ??
But of course, in the larger view, all the teams will be winners! They will have taken on the challenge of collaborating to build something useful in the real world, solving myriad real-world technical problems along the way, and bringing up beginners in the process. CodeRaising aims to be a real growth experience for everyone who joins in.