Connect, Build, and Empower organizations to change lives across the world.

Our 3rd annual Opportunity Hack will open at 8:00 a.m. on October 21st.

At Opportunity Hack, you can network, share ideas and build solutions that enable impact and social innovation!  Join a team that will hack solutions for any of the problem statements listed by our partnering non-profits!

Check in will be from 8:00 until 9:00. Please note that ONLY THE FIRST 200 will be allowed to enter the door.

At 9:00 we'll have our opening keynote speaker.

Then the fun begins! Our non-profits will all have an opportunity to pitch their ideas to all the participants. We'll be moving this along quickly so that we can move into team building. You can bring a whole team, but if you don't, we're pretty good at facilitating team formation. This is the part of the program that people tend to be the most nervous about, but it all works out. We've done it successfully a number of times and we'll make sure you get hooked up.

9:30 a.m. Non-profits pitch their problem statements to hackers.

11:00 a.m. It's time to get your Hack On! You have from now until 3:00 p.m. on Sunday! We're providing meals and snacks and support around the clock.

3:00 p.m. on Sunday it's time to let the keyboard rest. You'll want to have your prototype and presentation ready for a three minute presentation to the judges with some Q&A. There will be a brief intermission for scoring and then the top teams will be chosen and accolades will flow! This will mark the end of the event and the beginning of the celebration, where we will also provide appropriate supplies.

Detailed Agenda

Saturday (10/21)

• 08:00AM: Doors open for check-in
• 08:10AM: Breakfast
• 09:00AM: Opening ceremony
• 09:30AM: Non-profits pitch their problems to hackers
• 10:30AM: Team formation
• 11:00AM: The Hackathon begins!
• Noon: Lunch is served
• 02:00PM: Submit team details
• 06:00PM: Dinner is served
• HACK THROUGH THE NIGHT

Sunday (10/22)

• Midnight: Pizza served
• 08:00AM:Breakfast is served & Subject matter experts available (3 hours)
• Noon: Lunch is served / I can’t think straight but this tastes awesome!
• 02:00PM: Code checked into GitHub
• 02:45PM: Presentations submitted on DevPost
• 03:00PM: Hackathon ends
• 03:15PM: Judging
• 05:00PM: Winners are announced / Prizathon!
• 05:30PM: You’ve survived… let’s celebrate!

Find out more about Opportunity Hack 2014, 2015, 2016, and some of the success stories here.

Partners

To be determined - please contact us if you are interested 

Keynote

Derek Neighbors, CTO at Tanga

Derek Neighbors is a serial entrepreneur who helps people bring ideas to reality. Derek co-founded Gangplank, a collaborative workspace, in 2008 to help encourage local creatives to explore innovative ideas and create what they are passionate about.   He now serves as CTO at Tanga. 

Judge Biographies

Wes Hummel, Head of Site Operations and Site Reliability Engineering, PayPal

https://www.linkedin.com/in/weshummel

Wes leads a team of globally distributed software developers, quality engineers, communication specialists, and operations engineers. Wes joined PayPal from Clarity Communications Inc, a telecommunications start-up, where he was a software engineer, architect, tester, project manager, release engineer, and any other role the small startup needed.  Prior to working at Clarity, Wes worked at Motorola developing software in their Cellular Infrastructure Group.

Wes has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and a Masters degree in Business Administration. He is passionate about mentoring, career development, and using technology to deliver business and customer value.

Stuart Hostler, Code Craftsman and Software Engineer, Amazon

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shostler

Stuart is a software engineer, architect, and agile coach whose passion centers around not only building amazing solutions but building amazing teams.  He's a relentless voice in the conversation about how to organize people around work to create consistent steady value, while enabling people to live a good life at the same time.  Burnout and lack of diversity are not a necessary side effect of tech.

Stuart has been in the software industry for over a decade, with experience from defense to education, and from startup to corporations. He is currently employed by Amazon and working to automatically identify, prevent and enforce customer impacting seller activity on Amazon's marketplace.

Chris Huie,  Developer Evangelist at Galvanize Inc

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-huie-896936b2

Chris Huie is the Developer Evangelist and Phoenix tech community ambassador at Galvanize in Phoenix. He is hugely active in the tech community organizing and supporting several dev focused meetups along with helping organize some of Phoenix's large tech-focused events like SQL Saturday, DevOps Day, and Startup Weekend. His background is in financial modeling and data science along with experience in front and back-end development with the cool and hip new technologies like Vue and React/Redux. When Chris isn't geeking out on Street Fighter V, Hearthstone, or watching Twitch he is walking his 70lb English Bulldog Rio. 

Isac Artzi, PhD, Program Lead for Computer Science at Grand Canyon University.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/isacartzi

Dr. Artzi teaches upper level Computer Science courses in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Analytics, Mathematical Modeling, and MBA courses. He mentors senior capstone projects and conducts research on adaptive algorithms and machine learning. Dr. Artzi's career spans 30 years in industry, research, military training, and international travel. Dr. Artzi's achievements include his Lynda.com C Programming class with over 1,100,000 student views in 142 countries, two software patents with Silicon Valley startup AppStream (acquired by Symantec), satellite-based distance learning systems in Israel (Gilat Satellite, Ltd), and published research in educational technology at Michigan State University. He holds a dual BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel, an MS in Computer Science from Michigan State University, a PhD in Instructional Design and Educational Technology from combined Michigan State University and Capella University programs, and a Data Science Specialization Certificate from Johns Hopkins University. 

Alicia Isaacson, technical IT recruiter for MDI Group, Phoenix AZ

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicia-isaacson

With close to 20 years of experience in IT Operations and Data analytics, Alicia currently spends her time connecting Arizona’s top talent to clients across the valley. When she’s not helping people land their dream jobs, she’s swimming, cooking and chilling with the fam. 

Roxy Lee,  Client Manager for MDI Group, Phoenix AZ

https://www.linkedin.com/in/roxylee

Roxy works with many of the great companies across the valley to assist in finding top talent to assist with their IT needs. She spends her time helping clients determine their product development strategies, sponsoring meetups, and connecting with the local IT community. She’s passionate about all things tech!

$7,199 in prizes

1. Join Opportunity Hack Arizona on DevPost
2. Come to the event with a team or we will help you build a team of like minded folks. 

• Scope
  How big an impact will your solution have on the community? Key things that are important are: (1) Scale of the problem being solved, (2) Potential reach, (3) Productivity gains
• User Experience
  In order for your solution to be used by customers, it needs to have a good user experience and you need to be able to demonstrate and market your solution so that it can succeed long term
• Innovation
  Displaying innovative solutions to the problems. Do you solve the problem in a novel way? Can you create a solution that is cohesive across different areas or technologies?
• Implementation
  The projects need to be able to move from "proof-of-concept" to working project. At the beginning of the hackathon, teams will be documenting their problem statement on devpost when creating their projects and assessed against it at the end.