Bible innovations around the world at Christian hackathons

Posted on November 10, 2016 by .BIBLE Registry Categories: Online Presence

Where can you find the latest innovations related to how people are engaging and interacting with the Bible? Some of the newest ideas about Scripture engagement are becoming realized at Christian hackathons.

What is a hackathon? A hackathon is "an event where computer programmers, designers, and strategists collaborate over a short period of time to create a new project or feature. A Christian hackathon is one where local or global issues are tackled from a Christian perspective. It’s technology as mission," explained Kent Shaffer at OpenChurch.com.

To make it easier for people to engage the Bible in a digital world, .BIBLE is creating a digital neighborhood to be the trusted online source for all things Bible through domain names ending with .BIBLE. The mission of .BIBLE is to encourage Bible engagement, translation, innovation, and global partnerships so that all people may experience the life-changing message of the Bible. As a sponsor of 2 recent Christian hackathons hosted by Code for the Kingdom and Leadership Network, the .BIBLE team is eager to see many of these projects go from development as a prototype into a publicly-launched website or app to help more people engage with the Scriptures.

First, there was the San Francisco Bay area Code for the Kingdom hackathon in September 2016, where 150 software developers and designers gathered in 3 locations (San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Fremont) to build code that provided solutions to some of their communities' challenges and some that have the potential to impact the world. We were encouraged to see that 40% of the projects created were related to the Bible. See the list of the projects.

Then, on the weekend of October 21-23, 2016, Code for the Kingdom connected 12 cities around the world for a Global Hackathon that brought together many hundreds of software developers, programmers, designers, creatives, and coders to build over 30+ projects. One of the special moments was sharing in a group video chat with all 12 locations and to pray together in real-time! The .BIBLE registry team (Pat Walker and DJ Chuang) was on-site at the Dallas location for this global hackathon, connecting with a handful of developers and innovators about the new possibilities that are being created with .BIBLE domain names. There were also a good handful of Bible-related projects developed at this global hackathon—see the list.

Our team launched the hackathon.bible website to make it easier (because it's a web address that's memorable and meaningful) for hackathon participants to quickly access Bible API's and get more information about how a .BIBLE domain name can be an integral part of getting people to access their projects, whether it was a website or an app.

Also, OpenChurch.com has posted a very useful list of resources for hackathons, Top 30 Resources for Christian Hackathons.

When we learn of when these projects are launching, or other Bible website and apps getting launched that were developed at Christian hackathons, we'll be sure to spread the word via our .BIBLE blog at get.bible/blog!