Rewired State – a network of over 1000 software developers and designers – and Refuges United came together for a day of exciting work at the RefUnited Mod day 2013 hackathon, hosted by the London Google Campus.  

For those of us who don’t spend our daily lives in the programming world, hackathons are one-day events, which bring together a bunch of tech savvy developers to work intensively on a specific project. For Refugees United these hackathons play a crucial role in ensuring that our family tracing platform keeps improving and serve our users in the best way possible. This time around, the tech geniuses pooled their brain power to come up with a number of amazing projects, all aimed at increasing the likelihood of families finding each other through our database. 

Some of the exciting projects developed include the creation of a “geoname database” that indexes geographical information and thereby streamlines the process of locating relatives; an SMS-enabled notification system that contacts people on their mobile phones when they have a profile match; and a project to improve the platform’s spam filter. Additionally, a project working on making our database more accessible for persons who are not familiar with modern technology or illiterate through the use of voice-to-voice messaging is also looking very promising as well as a project using family trees to match people. Have a closer look at some of the projects here.

Simon Engelbrecht, CTO of Refugees United, says about the event: “I’m really happy with the results of this hackathon! We got some really interesting and very innovative ideas in terms of how to match profiles in our database and some great ideas to reach out to even the most disconnected of refugees via different technologies.” 

We are very thankful to all the developers who participated and helped us improve our system, enabling us to reconnect even more families through our online family tracing tool.