THE CHALLENGE Teams will have ten hours to concept and create a prototype that addresses the challenge. Successful ideas will connect Portland citizens to their public schools, and/or engage them in the five ways schools have said would be most useful - a coat, a can, a book, an hour, or a grand. The hack day will conclude with five-minute demos of each team's projects.

BACKGROUND On June 2nd, in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office and GOOD Magazine, we’re holding a Hack Day to explore how technology can be used to connect Portland’s public schools with neighborhoods and business. This project emerged from a GOOD Ideas for Cities event that took place earlier this year. You can see the presentation on GOOD's site. http://www.good.is/post/supporting-neighborhood-schools-a-good-idea-for-portland/

THE PROBLEM 85% of people in central Portland have no children of school age. This means that the majority has no natural connection with the school system. We want to make it easier for that 85% to support Portland’s public schools.

Our research with schools and supporting organizations showed that a few simple things – books, food, clothing and people's time – could make a big difference to students. We also learnt that there are many organizations in Portland that are set up to support schools in these ways. We want to build a tool that makes it easy to find these organizations, and to give resources to them.

HACK DAY RESOURCES To help us solve this, we’ll have representatives from Portland’s public schools and from some of the main organizations who are already supporting these schools. The Software Association of Oregon, which has built CitySync will be joining us as well. Designers and our partners will be available on the day for further conversations about promotion of the tools that we create. We are also connecting with the Personal Democracy Forum taking place in NYC the following week, and hope to feed the best ideas into that event.

Extra info: [email protected]