Hawaii Annual Code Challenge 2016

As part of the marketing team, I helped organize the first State of Hawaii Annual Code Challenge (HACC). HACC is a coding competition that uses open innovation to make Hawaii more technologically attractive, increase transparency between the State of Hawaii and the public, and promote a more efficient and effective state government. The event had over 200 registered attendees.

The process of organizing this event was done as part of the State’s Department of Enterprise Technology Services (ETS)’s Transformation Internship Program (TIP). As this was the first such event, a large amount of preliminary work had to be done in order to decide what kind of event we intended to run. For the marketing team it was especially important to have a clear picture of the end result. My particular role on the team involved assisting in writing the press releases as well as the rules for the event.

I went into this internship knowing it would be different from any project that I had done before, and as such chose to be part of the marketing team (as opposed to the team building the website, for instance) specifically because I wanted to learn a skill that was new to me, coming from a natural science background. Other than learning how a large event is marketed, I also learned what it is like to work on a large project with many moving parts.

HACC website is here.

Article about the internship here

Article about the event here