Community Outreach
Hack For Athens | Civic Hacking For The Greater Good
Hack for Athens is a local event held as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking whose goal is to utilize technology to solve local issues. Across the country, developers, entrepreneurs, designers, activists, and citizens come together over the course of a weekend and team up to create solutions to community problems. In the past, Hack for Athens attendees have solved challenging problems in the Athens community involving affordable internet, local banking and safe drinking water. Each team chooses a challenge and after research and brainstorming, designs and develops a solution.
Return True | Turn Down Your Head, Turn Up Your Heart
The concept of return true; is simple: identify struggling businesses or organizations whose objective is to enrich society or provide aid to the community, then help them by creating and providing the services, applications, and business processes necessary for more effective, efficient business practices.
In programming, return true; is a statement that returns the boolean, or truth, value 'true' to the subroutine's return address. We use return true; as the name of this concept to imply that when we are called upon, we will return something that is unequivocally true. If our help is needed, we will be certainty, we will be sincerity--we will be truth.
Pro Bono | Paying It Forward
Every fiscal quarter, Black Box takes on one client and provides twelve weeks of research, consulting, development, integration, and deployment services, pro bono. In order to qualify for our pro bono quarter, your business must be an Athens based tech start-up, or your business or organization must have a positive impact on the Athens community.
Once you have been selected and agree to be our quarterly pro bono client, the fun begins! We start with three weeks of research and consulting, move on to six weeks of development, then finish the quarter off with three weeks of integration and deployment. If you’re interested in teaming up with Black Box, please fill out and submit the form to the right. We look forward to hearing from you.
- First 3 Weeks - Our teams come together and conduct heavy research and development, thoroughly analyzing the issues your business or organization is currently experiencing in order to determine the best course of action. We step back, look at the big picture, understand what needs to be done, and map out a 6 week battle plan and 3 week integration and deployment process.
- Following 6 Weeks - The battle plan mapped out during the previous three weeks of discovery, analysis, and research is put into action. Black Box begins development, meeting once a week to review the status of work, keep everyone on the same page, and ensure we'll hit our target.
- Last 3 Weeks - Once development has completed, we begin integrating the solutions we've created or improved into the existing infrastructure, prepare for deployment, ensure stability and functional correctness of the system, and after 12 hard weeks, release!