My role in this year’s #HACK was on the coordinating team, which included planning for the big weekend. During the weekend, my time went to helping our co-director, Yan, with operations and community engagement on Discord. I found it to be inspiring to see so many people come together to spend their entire weekend hacking away at a project for missions. The biggest encouragement was to see people across the continent collaborating. Even if the project was only a prototype, there were new relationships formed. Now a technologist in Silicon Valley knows another like-minded technologist in Pennsylvania.

Our in-person pod took place at a Christian co-working space in Palo Alto, CA. Besides helping out with community engagement on the virtual side, my highlight for the weekend was capturing video of our pod. Several of the mentors and judges had come through to visit and join in the hackathon. Apps like Zoom and Discord made virtual communication easy to use and accessible. But, it has opened up the desire to actually meet these people in real life. We found that in-person gathering after having only ever met online was so much faster in building trust. Plus, this was like a gathering of super-stars in the faith, tech, and missions space.