Hackathon 4Good Hatches Great Ideas at SuiteWorld 2014

As part of this year’s SuiteWorld Global Customer Conference, the NetSuite.org team launched our first Hackathon 4Good – an event bringing together NetSuite’s employees, customers and partners to develop innovative solutions to charity challenges.

NetSuite.org, the company’s corporate citizenship arm, leverages our people and our product to transform the social sector through software donations and discounts, pro bono volunteer services and traditional volunteering. The Hackathon 4Good was part of our Social Solutions program, where we create custom NetSuite solutions specifically to address charity needs.

On May 12, a group of 35 technologists got together for 12 hours to tackle challenges for two NetSuite.org grantees, Kiva and the Positive Coaching Alliance. Representatives from each organization arrived bright and early to brief the participants on the challenges that they were facing, and what the ideal solution would achieve.

Under the facilitation of our nonprofit partner Geeks Without Bounds, participants, including NetSuite employees from the U.S. and Czech Republic, NetSuite Customers and NetSuite technology partners, broke into seven teams and started outlining their ideas.

Within an hour, the teams had each decided on a direction and were off to the races, developing their solutions on the NetSuite platform.

Before they knew it, it was time to present their prototype to the judging panel, which included NetSuite’s Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Evan Goldberg, NetSuite Product SVP Gary Wiessinger and representatives from both charity partners.

Each team had a solid idea and a great presentation (the judges had a hard time selecting just one winner for each charity) – but in the end, two teams won out. The “DAF Hackers” for the Kiva Challenge and team “HackShack” for the PCA challenge.”

Here’s an overview of the challenges and winning solutions! Congratulations to both teams and a huge thanks to everyone who participated in this event – we’re looking forward to planning the next one!

Kiva Challenge:

• Kiva facilitates micro-loans to alleviate poverty.
• Kiva needed to better show lenders how and where their loans are distributed.

Winning Team:

• Team Name: DAF Hackers
• Team Members: Scott Henderson (Celigo - Partner), Yang Jiang (Celigo - Partner), Jay Yeh (NetSuite Employee), Song Sun (NetSuite Employee)

Winning Solution Featured:

• NetSuite Custom records to track loan data
• CSV import, scheduled script + Kiva APIs to import loan financial data
• Suitelet to visualize how loan gets re-invested over time

Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) Challenge:

• PCA delivers workshops for youth athletics coaches.
• PCA needed to measure workshop attendance, effectiveness and impact.

Winning Team:

• Team Name: The Hack Shack
• Andrei Lopukhin (NetSuite Customer), Martin Evangelista (Partner – CloudTech), Cela Smith (NetSuite Employee), Manduo Dong (NetSuite Employee)

Winning Solution Featured:

• Custom records + SuiteFlow to track workshop events and attendance
• Custom records + online forms to send follow-up surveys
• Dashboard for metrics and visualization of data
• Mobile version of survey

Posted by Erin Dieterich, Director, Corporate Citizenship, NetSuite.org