Subject: Fwd: Choose Your Adventure: Hackathon Helps Build Smart Games for Democratic Development | DemocracyWorks: A Blog of the National Democratic Institute
From: "Ken Wollack" <[email-masked]>
To: "Ken Wollack" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2015 14:57:38 -0500

I thought you might be interested in the following Blog post about the
Amazon-sponsored hackathon conference, dubbed "re:Invent", at which
developers responded to an NDI tech challenge to build a smart game for
democratic development.

With best regards,

Ken

Kenneth Wollack
President
National Democratic Institute
455 Massachusetts Ave., NW, 8th Floor
Washington, DC 20001
202-728-5500 (Tel)
888-875-2887 (Fax)
email: [email-masked]
website: www.ndi.org

Choose Your Adventure: Hackathon Helps Build Smart Games for Democratic
Development
<https://www.demworks.org/choose-your-adventure-hackathon-helps-build-smart-games-democratic-development>

Developers at AWS hackathon burn the midnight oil to
create prototype games to teach democratic lessons.

Over 18 grueling hours, more than 200 developers at the re:Invent Conference
<https://reinvent.awsevents.com/> in Las Vegas hosted by Amazon Web
Services (AWS) worked to solve tech challenges submitted by four non-profit
organizations <https://reinvent.awsevents.com/hackathon.html>: UNICEF,
NPR’s Marketplace, Donors Choose, and NDI. NDI’s challenge to “design a
framework for building story-driven text-based games that convey lessons in
an engaging ‘choose your own adventure’ format,” drew more participants
than any other project.

Throughout the hackathon -- an event in which a large number of people meet
to engage in collaborative computer programming -- five teams worked to
deliver functional prototypes of a game system. When it was all over, “Team
29” was declared the winner
<https://twitter.com/NDItech/status/651643926126927872>. The winning team
and several other participants committed to bring the demo version to a
fully-functional product in the coming months, which NDI will be able to
use to enhance its programs.

Who said what happens in Vegas has to stay in Vegas?

Since the hackathon, NDI and its new partners launched a public beta of a
game called StoryLand <http://storyland.nditech.org/>, which builds on the
platform created in Las Vegas. The sample demo game created takes players
through an adventure in urban governance. You, as a newly elected council
member of the fictional town of Sunny Glen, must make decisions about how
to allocate town resources. Your first choice: should you build the park
that you promised your constituents during your campaign or come to the aid
of a neighboring district that is without power and water after a
devastating storm?

*Click here to play <http://storyland.nditech.org/>.*

In addition to sponsoring the hackathon, NDI was invited to participate in
a panel discussion called “Going All In with AWS
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R27Mkjeo7qY&index=3&list=PLhr1KZpdzukcaPbx7Hsn4tsspfubBIGlc>.”
Users, including representatives from Netflix, Capital One, and Major
League Baseball, discussed their experiences and stories of migrating all
of their computing needs to AWS -- Amazon’s cloud computing service. NDI
Deputy CTO VJ Rao had quite a number of interesting stories
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R27Mkjeo7qY&index=3&list=PLhr1KZpdzukcaPbx7Hsn4tsspfubBIGlc>
to share with the audience.

The conference was a fantastic experience for NDI and a great venue for
connecting civic-minded developers with NGOs and nonprofits. The
partnership between AWS and NDI has been a fruitful one. Amazon has been a
huge supporter of DemTools <http://dem.tools> -- NDI’s suite of open-source
webapps designed to solve some of the most common challenges NDI programs
and partners face. NDI will be launching the next generation of DemTools --
DemTool 2.0 -- on December 9. DemTools 2.0 includes substantial
improvements to NDI’s existing suite of tools
<https://www.ndi.org/demtools-launch-recap>, along with three exciting new
applications.

Keep an eye out for future projects - there’s sure to be others in the
future with Amazon’s support.

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