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Remember, you can use ANY of the Facebook developer products in your solution. Integrating additional products may help you score higher in the “Implementation of the Idea” judging criterion.
Bonus Prize Community Categories
To compete for bonus prizes, developers are invited to build solutions across one of the three community categories (i) bridge on and offline experiences; (ii) drive engaging communities; and (iii) build and grow communities.
Community leaders from around the world will be participating in the hackathon to help focus teams on the different types of problems they encounter as they work to build, grow and engage their communities.
- Bridge on and offline experiences:
Using the Internet to get off the Internet is a powerful concept. In-person experiences help build relationships and strengthen communities. In this category you’ll be encouraged to use technology to connect communities in-person.
Girls LOVE Travel empowers women to travel safely and with support from their community. The leader, Haley Woods, says, “We have struggled finding each other. When accidents / world events / tragedies take place, we’d like to figure out who is nearby to help. From a social perspective, if you are a member traveling alone, it would be amazing to be able to find someone from the Group nearby to meet & hang out with along the way!”
Grown and Flown Parents is a safe place for parents to discuss issues surrounding parenting teens, college students and young adults. Leader, Lisa Heffernan, says, “Our members rally to help each other’s kids in real life. Parents come into the group and might say their teen's car has broken down in Texas but they live in New Jersey, or their college kid is in the emergency room in DC but they live in California, and the group rallies around looking for help. When a member’s child is ill or just in a difficult situation, other members who live nearby volunteer to help. We find that locating parents who are geographically close to where their student is can be challenging.”
- Build and grow community:
This category encompasses the many opportunities to build solutions that help create and expand a community, from the beginning of group creation to scaling a large group.
Show Me Your Stethoscope: In 2015, a Nurse in a Beauty pageant shared her “talent” of being a nurse and was promptly mocked about wearing a “Doctor's stethoscope”. Nurses were outraged. In response, Janie Garner created a Facebook Group for nurses called “Show Me Your Stethoscope” (SMYS). In less than 7 days, 1 in 5 nurses in the U.S. joined Show Me Your Stethoscope. Since then, SMYS has evolved from a Facebook Group into the largest nursing organization in the world, focused on support, advocacy, philanthropy & education.
Both Safrut Shava (a group in Israel focused on educating parents and early-childhood educators about the importance of gender-diverse literature for children) and EyeSeeMe (An African-American children’s bookstore focused on helping children find and read diverse literature) spoke of an interest in building a children’s book recommendations tool to make it easy to find and share excellent & diverse children’s books.
Other groups were interested in solutions that encouraged new members to start engaging, an experience that can be intimidating.
- Drive engaging communities:
This category includes applications that drive engagement within a community, including sharing and communication between members, and between members and organizers.
Leaders of community groups are looking for new ways to engage group members who have been unengaged for some time. They also have a need to build solutions that help distinguish important information.
SocietyLabs is a group with the goal of connecting non-profit organizations with software developers, designers, and tech volunteers. The leader, Roy Munin, says, “Our members (nonprofits) have difficulty finding community members with specific expertise, like designers, Wordpress experts, Facebook ad experts, to work with on our weekly side projects and bimonthly hackathons. A good member directory could really help. And even better, it would be great to have matching suggestions based on what people are looking for! This would save us weeks of work matching people manually.”
International Hernia Collaboration is an international platform for all surgeons, healthcare providers, and industry friends to learn and share knowledge of hernias. The leader Brian Jacob says, “We have the same top 20 engaged users. We have 5500 vetted members in our group, but the majority remain silent and read only. We do not know how to engage these silent readers to inject additional energy into the community.”