Founded | 11.1.11 (incorporated 12.12.12) |
---|---|
Type | non-profit organization |
Headquarters | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
Location |
|
Services | Tech events and innovation consulting |
Members | 100,000+ |
JJ Beh, Robin Toop, Shaharris, Chloe Kagan | |
Website | hackernest |
HackerNest is a not-for-profit organization and global movement founded on January 11, 2011. [1] The organization unites local technology communities around the world through community events and socially beneficial hackathons [2] to further its mission of economic development through technological proliferation. It is Canada's largest, most prolific technology community [3] with growing international reach.
HackerNest was founded on the belief that the fastest, most permanent way to improve the world is to build supportive local technology and innovation communities characterized by trust, sharing, and respect. [3] The rationale is that the technology community is the cornerstone of economic development enabling collaboration, innovation, knowledge-sharing, recruiting, and scientific progress. [3] [4] Growing and strengthening the community lets businesses hire better, perform better, and create more jobs, which ultimately increases economic prosperity.
The organization's ideology is rooted in the idea that minor tweaks at the start of a process in a dynamic system can have a major impact on the result. . [1] HackerNest "splinter cells" (chapters) regularly host "Tech Socials" open to anyone interested in technology. The events vary slightly by city, but maintain the same core tenets: all are friendly and down-to-earth. [4]
The first Tech Social was held in Toronto on Monday, January 31, 2011. [5] HackerNest Toronto is currently the world's largest Meetup group for programmers [6] and Canada's largest technologist community. [2] [7] [8]
As of July 2017, HackerNest splinter cells have run over 550+ events in 34 cities across 14 countries on 5 continents. [1]
In 2014, HackerNest produced Construct, Canada's largest hardware hackathon [7] [9] and DementiaHack for the British government, [10] [11] [12] the world's first hackathon dedicated to helping people with dementia and their caregivers. [13]
In 2015, the organization produced Deloitte's first internal innovation hackathon as well as DementiaHack [14] [15] Facebook as lead sponsor [16] [17] and support from the UK government, the Public Health Agency of Canada, and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.
In 2016, HackerNest produced CourtHack [18] with the National Center for State Courts in Salt Lake City at t ) and the Hack4Equality [19] [20] > LGBTQ hackathon with Grindr [21] in Los Angeles which heavily featured White House Promise Zone and Opportunity Project data. [22]
DEF CON is a hacker convention held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. The first DEF CON took place in June 1993 and today many attendees at DEF CON include computer security professionals, journalists, lawyers, federal government employees, security researchers, students, and hackers with a general interest in software, computer architecture, hardware modification, conference badges, and anything else that can be "hacked". The event consists of several tracks of speakers about computer- and hacking-related subjects, as well as cyber-security challenges and competitions. Contests held during the event are extremely varied and can range from creating the longest Wi-Fi connection to finding the most effective way to cool a beer in the Nevada heat.
Meetup is a social media platform for hosting and organizing in-person and virtual activities, gatherings, and events for people and communities of similar interests, hobbies, and professions. It was founded in 2002 by Scott Heiferman and four others. The company was acquired by WeWork in 2017 and remains headquartered in New York City. WeWork sold it to AlleyCorp, an early stage NY-focused venture fund and incubator, in March 2020. In January 2024, Bending Spoons acquired Meetup.
North York is a former township and city and is now one of the six administrative districts of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is located in the northern area of Toronto, centred around Yonge Street, north of Ontario Highway 401. It is bounded by York Region to the north at Steeles Avenue, on the west by the Humber River, on the east by Victoria Park Avenue. Its southern boundary is erratic and corresponds to the northern boundaries of the former municipalities of Toronto: York, Old Toronto and East York. As of the 2016 Census, the district has a population of 644,685.
A hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. They are often run using agile software development practices, such as sprint-like design wherein computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, product managers, project managers, domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on engineering projects, such as software engineering.
Grindr is a location-based social networking and online dating application targeted towards gay and bisexual men, and transgender people.
Google Developer Day events were one-day web developer-focused gatherings around the world held annually by Google. They include seminars and codelabs focused on building of web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies such as Android, HTML5, Chrome, App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and give participants an excellent chance to learn about Google developer products as well as meet the engineers who work on them.
East London Tech City is a technology cluster of high-tech companies located in East London, United Kingdom. Its main area lies broadly between St Luke's and Hackney Road, with an accelerator space for spinout companies at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Ray Sharma is the founding partner and CEO of Extreme Venture Partners, the founder of XMG Studio and a super angel investor.
Noisebridge is an anarchistic maker and hackerspace located in San Francisco. It is inspired by the European hackerspaces Metalab in Vienna and c-base in Berlin. Noisebridge describes itself as "a space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and learning". Outside of its headquarters, Noisebridge forms a wider international community. It was organized in 2007 and has had permanent facilities since 2008.
Glacier Media is a Canadian business information and media products company. It provides news, market information and sector-specific data within North America and internationally.
Hacking Health is a social organization that pairs innovators with healthcare experts to build solutions to front-line healthcare problems through the use of emerging technology.
Canopy Labs is a customer analytics company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with offices in San Francisco. It was founded in 2012 and offers SaaS marketing analytics for businesses and organizations. The company is an alumnus of the Y Combinator accelerator program. Canopy Labs was acquired by Drop.
MTF Labs is a series of festivals and events encouraging innovation through creative work, particularly music.
StartupBus is an annual technological startup competition and entrepreneurship boot camp, described as a Hackathon, created by Elias Bizannes in February 2010. The competition is held across a 3-day bus ride where contestants or "buspreneurs" compete to conceive the best technology startup. The competition seeks to attract young top talents to compete, to search for the most innovative startup conceived by the groups, where the winners are determined by a panel of judges. Starting from February 2011, it has gone through many iterations in various continents from 2011 to the present day, with the first in Austin, Texas and subsequently in North America, Europe and Africa.
Junction is a hackathon organizer with headquarters Espoo, Finland. Started in 2015, Junction grew to be one of the largest organizers in Europe. In 2018 it expanded globally with a Junction event at Tsinghua University in China and cooperation with Chinese and South Korean universities bringing high performing students to attend the event in Helsinki.
HackMIT is an annual student-run hackathon held in the fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The National Security Innovation Network is a United States Department of Defense (DoD) program office under the Defense Innovation Unit that seeks to create new communities of innovators to solve national security problems. NSIN partners with national research universities and the venture community to reinvigorate civil-military technology collaboration. As opposed to making investments in specific technologies, government research and development programs, or startups, NSIN focuses on human capital innovation – i.e., developing and enabling innovators and human-centered networks to solve national security problems. In support of this mission, NSIN provides tools, training, and access to DoD assets that enable entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to develop and commercialize high potential products in the national interest.
Cris Thomas is an American cybersecurity researcher, white hat hacker, and award winning best selling author. A founding member and researcher at the high-profile hacker security think tank L0pht Heavy Industries, Thomas was one of seven L0pht members who testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs (1998) on the topic of government and homeland computer security, specifically warning of internet vulnerabilities and claiming that the group could "take down the internet within 30 minutes".
VanHacks is an annual hackathon that is part of Vancouver Startup Week. The focus of the hackathon is creating solutions for local non-profit organizations from the Vancouver area over the course of 36 hours. Sponsors of the event have included KPMG, Best Buy, Slack (software), Lighthouse Labs, Nespresso, and Red Bull.
NaijaHacks is a hackathon and tech invention competition in Nigerian, which aims to encourage youth to use technology to create solutions for their communities and the world using technologies including blockchain and artificial intelligence. Officially, NaijaHacks is described as an official national "Movement of Makers, Leaders, and Disruptors".