WordCamp KC 2012 – Hackthon

This weekend I am not only attending, but also speaking at Word Camp Kansas City (KC). Word Camp is a regionally hosted event for WordPress (WP) users. The event kicked off last night (Friday, June 1) with a kick off party and hackathon.

It was the first time I ever participated in a hackathon, so it was kind of interesting. The hackathon basically is a collaborative group of designers, developers and publishers who work within a few hours to help re-design, develop and publish a website for a non-profit organization, in this case our platform had to be WordPress, given it wasps a Word Camp event. The organization that Word Camp KC would be building a site for was Maison De Naissance , which is a birthing home in Haiti. They wanted a more organized site, which would highlight their three main goals of providing access, quality and resources.

I got to participate at the designer’s table, where developed a list of possible free themes for the site and organized a folder of possible images to use for the site. The images were selected from hundreds of files in which the client had provided. We stuck with a free theme, because the goal was to use as much open source content available and only tweak as needed.Once the designers made our suggestions we passed it on to the developer group to work on, while the publishers would work simultaneously  to place all the content on the site. While working at the designer table it was interesting to hear for the others that most of them, like myself, typically do freelance projects, where they take on all roles of designer, developer and publisher, so it was kind of werid to just pick out pictures and themes and let the other groups take it from there.

The event ran pretty smoothly and left me eager for the next mornings main event. Sadly, I had to leave after this, so I didn’t get to see the end results, but I hear it turned out very well.