Those of us working on Horizon from Seattle are planning a hackday this coming Sunday, November 13th. The Impact Hub Seattle team has graciously agreed to let us use their fantastic space in the heart of Pioneer Square. I was an Impact Hub member in 2013, and recently re-joined after settling back in Seattle after being in Santiago for Startup Chile for much of 2014 – thank you to Brian Howe (an advisor for us) and the rest of the team for being so supportive and generous.

Originally, we were planning to gather at my apartment in Lower Queen Anne, but it’s not conducive to seating a group of people all working on computers. Without the previous constraint of space, we can now accommodate friends and others passionate about Horizon’s long term mission of increasing access to travel opportunities via facilitating community.

The Horizon technology stack includes Heroku, PostGres, AWS, Ruby on Rails, React.JS, Objective C, and Android.

What will we be working on?

We have a few priorities on the technology side. The first is adding key functionality (editing host city, search by city, filtering results, etc) to the web app. The second is the Android app we’ve recently begun development on. We’ve also been working on a profile redesign for iOS that needs to be implemented. We also know there is work needed to improve group discovery so travelers and hosts know what groups are available. If you’re interested in working on an open source project instead, you are welcome to contribute to the first travel app we built, Oh Hey World (GitHub repo).

Finally, if you’re not a technologist, that’s okay - we can certainly use marketing and community building help to advance the Travel by Giving concept. We’re currently supporting Kiva but the plan is to enable any host to raise money for their favorite charity.

To recap the exact details:

• What: Horizon Hackday with a focus on Travel by Giving
• Where: Impact Hub Seattle, 220 2nd Ave South, Seattle, WA
• When: December 13th from 11 am-8 pm
• Who: Anyone passionate about travel, community, and social impact
• Why: Increasing travel opportunities matters

If you’re interested in joining and helping/collaborating with us for a day, please send me an email. Being in Seattle isn’t an absolute necessity to get involved – if you live elsewhere, but want to collaborate virtually over Slack, Trello, and Skype - I’d love to hear from you.

PS: Yes, we will stream the 10 am Seahawks-Ravens game.