BUILD 2022 - merging tech skills with faith
From an article by Kingdom Code
BUILD 2022 is a hackathon that took place in London. It was their seventh year of coming together for a weekend of work, merging tech skills with their Christian faith. This year saw the return of many people, a number of new faces and ministries coming together for a weekend of cross-church of productivity, focus, community building, and worship. Here are some of their reflections:
One of the joys of an event like BUILD is the time and space to join with Christian believers from all different churches across the UK and beyond. Alasdair Munday, software developer now training to lead a church, led us in a time of worship throughout our time together, digging deep into Psalm 133,
“How good and pleasant it is, when God’s people live together in unity!”
One of the ways that this works out in practice at BUILD is through all the participants joining together in teams to work on specific projects, however, avoiding the element of competition. Instead we encourage people to jump between projects as the need arises, to make sure each one was a success.
Nia, a designer and first time attendee said, "It is really encouraging to be surrounded and work alongside fellow Christians who want to create technology for God’s Kingdom."
It is right to highlight some of the exciting and impactful work that has been completed during the time together. Each year we ask those attending to vote for particular favourites, this year’s two categories were, ‘the project with the biggest potential for Kingdom impact’, and ‘the other project I’d have liked to work on’.
The project with the biggest potential for Kingdom impact was Bible Trainer, focusing on verse memorisation. The project was initially kicked on at BUILD 2018 as an android app, this year it was brought it back to explore building in voice recognition - allowing a user to speak the memorized scripture and then be corrected as they go. Another angle which they explored was using Amazon Alexa to help users listen and repeat the passage back. Both elements of the project are still being worked on.
The other project that gained attention as being the one people would have liked to work on besides their team, was Upsio, a warehouse tool designed specifically for the needs of foodbanks. During the weekend, they devised a way of categorising containers of food within a foodbank, and a quick and easy method of seeing and checking the best-before dates to ensure that the food is distributed before it goes out of date on the shelf. Initially this project will be trialled in Shrewsbury, but the hope is that it will be able to be shared across many foodbanks going forwards.
BUILD 2023 is scheduled to take place on 13–14th October 2023. If you think you’d like to participate in a hackathon then they welcome all sorts of skillsets including project managers, designers, innovators, developers, etc.
An event to attend next year? Read the full article here.
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From an article by Kingdom Code, 01/02/2023