Fwd.Us Immigration Hackathon: Immigration Visualization Project

I’ve just posted a project summary up for my team’s work at the FWD.us DREAMer Hackathon at the Program for Legal Tech & Design’s site. Come over & read about what we built, see our demo, and read about our future plans. And I uploaded my entire photo log of the event, from Day 1 dinner to Day 3 demos. Here’s a clip:

Screen Shot 2013-11-24 at 1.06.34 PM

This past week, I was invited to serve as a Design Mentor for the Fwd.Us DREAMer Hackathon. The event featured a group of 20-some immigrants, most of them without documentation, leading up small teams of designers & coders. Each team was tasked with coming up with an idea to help immigrants, or the immigration reform movement. We would work for 2 days at the LinkedIn headquarters in Mountain View to come up with a working demo of our idea.

I was mentor to team NoblePaths.

Fwd_us DreamerHack 2013-11-21 16.44.30

Our goal was to create a visualization app that would empower immigrants to tell their personal story in a share-able, if not viral way. The point was to make the complicated (if not, outright broken) immigration system visible, and in human terms rather than in cold, formal, legalistic ways.