Hack-a-Thon for the Coalition of Austin Community Gardens

Hey everyone, The Coalition of Austin Community Gardens is excited to announce a hack-a-thon on Saturday July 14th to finish work on the Garden Dating Application started at the Code For America event back in February. The project that we will be working on is Garden Match (working title), an application that facilitates the matching of interested gardeners with space in community gardens or other agricultural space throughout the City. The current issue is that that demand often builds up for well known garden spaces (in the form of multi-year waiting lists) and start-up gardens have trouble attracting enough involvement. By creating a platform to centrally manage this information and provide proximity matching we will be able to catalyze interest of new gardeners and for new garden spaces and get people involved in spaces closer to where they want to be. These mockups hint at how easy it could be to find a space to garden with this tool (home, search, results). In the spirit of Code for America's mission, we intend this application to be scaled to cities across the country. Conjunctured will again be our gracious hosts and delicious garden fresh dishes will be provided for breakfast, lunch and evening snacks by Coalition of Austin Community Gardens volunteers. Event information: Date / Time: Saturday July 14th, 9:30am to 7pm Location: Conjunctured,1309 East 7th Street, Austin, TX 78702 Hosted by: Coalition of Austin Community Gardens At the Code for America event in February we got a good start and picked our platform for development. The code is resting in GITHUB repository, the database is MongoDB and for the front-end we are using Ruby. We have the initial phase of functionality spec'ed and the database performing spacial queries so this event will be about flushing out the code and pushing toward a functional beta application. After the event we plan to continue the development remotely until we get a change to get the group back together for another coding event. Please RSVP for the event as space at the event is limited to 10-15 folks. This event will be solely focused on this application and we are interested in teaming with folks who are excited about this project and interested in working toward completion and feature expansion in the future. For more information on the project: All code is open source and for civic use. Application Wiki: http://codeatx.wikispaces.com/Garden+Dating Git Hub Site:https://github.com/memphis518/Garden-Dating-Service Email list if you are interested in staying in touch about this project: cfa-gardendating+subscribe@googlegroups.com Please contact me with any questions and thanks for the interest. Also, please pass this along to anyone you think might be interested. Thanks, Nathan Wilkes