【1991 Archives】

Less than a week before Inauguration Day991 Archives Eli Stein and his hackathon team spent their weekend poring over their laptops in hopes of coming up with something that might help improve American politics.

Hunched in a circle of armchairs next to dozens of other teams, Stein and his group decided on a project they think might be useful: Waze, but for protests.

"Moving forward, there's going to be a lot of protests, hopefully," Stein said of the impetus for his app, which would pull location data to show protesters entrances, exits and bathrooms at demonstrations like those happening across the country next weekend.

Stein's team was one of several that brought together New York's civically minded engineers, students and policy wonks at a hackathon hosted over the weekend by Debug Politics. The group is determined to help those in the tech world use their skills to solve the problems they saw in the 2016 election cycle.

SEE ALSO: Students only needed 36 hours to solve Facebook's fake news problem

Tech has faced more criticism than praise since November. The problem of fake news and its role in the election outcome has most directly been tied to Facebook and to a less extent Google. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley still has to figure out how it will contend with an unpredictable Donald Trump presidency.

In the New York headquarters of Casper, the mattress startup, developers on Saturday listened to speakers from Google and tried to impress judges like Stephanie Hannon, the chief technology officer for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Throughout the blue-hued, open-plan Flatiron office, groups with varying levels of skill, experience and political disaffection tried to solve the problems they saw as most pressing in a post-2016 world.

In hackathon mode, Debug Politics' participants stayed silently focused on their laptops and code with only a few breaks for speakers and lunch. The quietness is not for a lack of passion. Interest in and concern for a wide swath of political issues brought them out over the weekend.

The hackathon was officially nonpartisan, and while it certainly had a liberal bent, many entrants wanted to fix issues like the disconnect between rural and urban America, not just more straightforward Democratic causes. And Debug Politics' organizing comes from a place of patriotism, at least according to the event's decor: American flag stickers and pins, made with the zeros and ones of binary code.

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"It's about the election, but it's also about issues we've been frustrated with for years," Debug Politics founder Jesse Pickard told Mashable.

About 60 percent of the weekend's participants were engineers, 20 percent were designers and another 20 percent worked outside tech in policy, activism or government, Pickard estimated.

Many of the projects focused on helping people become better informed and engaged in the political system. One group of engineers from the startup Stay Wanderful built a Tinder for legislation, where users would swipe left or right on legislation that interested them until the app knew which bills they'd want to stay informed about.

"The number of people that didn't vote — we need to drive engagement and present information in a fair way so people are better informed," team member Jon Alexander said.

Jackie Xu and Byungzoon Kang, both 18, spent the weekend building an app that would help third-party candidates reach wider audiences. The pair didn't necessarily support Jill Stein or Gary Johnson in November's election, and Kang even went door-knocking for Clinton in Pennsylvania during the general election. But post-election, they wanted to build something for their peers who felt ostracized from the two-party system.

"It's almost inevitable anyway," Kang said of the rise of third parties. "We want to build a centralized platform for people who are interested in a third person."

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Tendi Muchenje was part of a team that built a web app that would inform people about gerrymandering happening in their districts. The app uses population and census data to show real-time effects on users' districts and representatives.

"The difference between the electoral and popular vote — it's caused by borders and how they're defined," Muchenje said. "People need to be educated about how things are changing in their area."

SEE ALSO: Medium's year in review shows a tech industry hooked on 2016 politics

The hackathon's top prizes went to Second Opinion, a Facebook Messenger app meant to help users determine trustworthiness of their feeds and find alternative viewpoints, and Stand Up, a project that coordinates calls to representatives and gives social proof of those civic actions.

Debug Politics is based in San Francisco, and the group is trying to encourage the tech world to stay engaged in the political system.

"The engineering and policy and government worlds – for solutions to come to life, we need both parties at the table," Pickard said. "We want to make sure we're speaking the same language."

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