Just over a week ago, Atlassian hosted a hackathon in the new Austin office to help support Atlassian Foundation’s Make a Diff initiative; a website designed to help charity organizations crowd-source their technical projects to anyone who wants to donate their time and skills to worthwhile causes.
With about 10 volunteers, both external and Atlassian employees, we accomplished a great deal in 24 hours and paved the way for the success of Make A Diff. During that time we…
Completed:
- Major visual improvements to the site home page including featuring new projects better and making it easier to navigate
- Lots of small, visual bug fixes to the login page and the project edit page
- Improvements to the data model, allowing volunteer skills to be configured by an administrator
Additionally, we started progress on major initiatives to:
- Build a user interface for the volunteer skills to be configured
- Integrate Hipchat for simple and easy communication between volunteers and project champions
- Allow administrators and project champions to create new pages of content
These changes will make it easier for users to get going quickly and allow them to contribute to projects and help organizations and Project Champions administer those projects more effectively.
A huge thank you goes out to all of those who participated and helped qualify the need and interest in such an amazing product. We look forward to continuing to work on the success of Make A Diff, and to use the information learned from this hackathon to plan future events of this nature.
The completed features will be pushed out to the production system in the coming weeks, and work will continue with an internal hackathon scheduled in Sydney later this month.
As this is an open source project, we encourage anyone who contributed during the hackathon to continue to do so if interested!
Thanks again for a fun and productive 24 hours!