More than 120 developers congregated at the AT&T Mobile App Hackathon during the Social Good Summitin New York City last week. Along with a community of global leaders including CEO of Mashable Peter Cashmore and actress Alexis Bledel, these developers responded to the theme “Digital Global Action” to tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges through mobile technology.
Here are my favorite apps from this “do-good” hackathon.
1. DecisionMakr
DecisionMakr allows Twitter users to give real-time qualitative and quantitative feedback to decision makers at conferences, town halls, and other public events. An aggregate leaderboard allows decision makers to see how effective their policy proposals are. Ranking encourages a race to the top and qualitative feedback serves an educational purpose, encouraging thoughtful and insightful feedback. This app will be implemented by Yale at the Climate COP meeting in Doha in December to give feedback to leaders on climate change policy negotiations.
2. Blood Donation
44,000 blood donations are needed every day. The Blood Donation App allows users to sign up and be alerted when local blood banks or hospitals run are running low on specific blood types. By relying on both geolocation and SMS, they are able to make sure donors know when they are really needed, and make an impactful donation in emergency situations.
3. Addicaid
Addicaid helps problem drinkers overcome their condition with an easy meeting finder and a semi-anonymous support network. With over 2.5 million annual deaths, alcoholism is critical social issue. Alcohols Anonymous (AA) has proven to be a promising treatment option. Despite AA’s success rate, a majority of AA members leave the program. Addicaid takes the stigma away of going to AA by crowd-sourcing sobriety. The community could be as rich as Reddit in conversation and as dry as a camel in BAC.
4. Hope
Hope allows food donors and charities to better communicate “what food inventory they have” and “how much” in a faster way than traditional methods. The app plans the best food pick-up routes and prioritizes the food pickup for food charities so that they can cut back on manpower driving around.
5. GiveImpact.ly
GiveImpact.ly is a mobile fundraising platform enabling non-profit organizations to communicate the impact of their monetary donation through project photos. Donors receive images of the project outcome and can share their impact while inspiring their friends to give.
6. Planetarium
Planetarium is a constellation-themed interactive art installation for fundraising events. The donors are stars and the NGO brings the stars together to form a constellation. The constellation shows how the NGO creates a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.
7. Chainfree
Chainfree is a chain text-messaging app that allow businesses to promote their corporate social responsibility and social goods to customers. Businesses will automatically donate to charitable organizations when a text has gone viral.
8. Foursquare Books
Foursquare Books integrates ebooks with geolocation and social media. The app is built on the foursquare API using over 300 locations of literary significance drawn from Literary Manhattan‘s database of libraries, bookstores, publishing house, literary themed bars, restaurants, hotels, and apartments. The app also allows you to see where authors lived, where books were written, and quotes from literature taking place in Manhattan. Demo.
9. good2dolist
Dwolla is a website that empowers anyone with an Internet connection to safely send money to friends or businesses. Good2dolist is task list that will deduct money from your Dwolla account and donate it to the charity of your choice when you fail to accomplish your tasks on time.
10. 4LWords
Between 13 million to 14 million individuals experience a depressive disorder within a given year. 4LWords lets you to share happiness at the individual level, allowing you to share positive messages about learning, living, and loving with your closest friends via SMS to keep track of why you should be happy. 4LWords believes that a positive society is one in which the majority of individuals are happy and educated and that social good starts with the individual.
What are your thoughts on these “socially-minded” applications?
For more details on these apps, you can tweet AT&T Developer Program at @attdeveloper.
