#10 SMS Lightning Talks

On August 1, Sonya Reynolds, Data Director for the NY Civic Engagement Table and member of the steering committee of Progressive Hacknight, will lead a panel of organizers and technologists whose works are focused on engaging with communities and voters through SMS texting.

Organizers and technologists present their work and share their experiences on how they have used SMS to organize, engage, and mobilize their communities, and how you can start coding and creating technologies to do just that.

• Allie Monck and Joyce Li from the NYC Council Speakers office will talk about how Robo-texting enabled them to engage and scale their reach to New Yorkers.

• Fryda Guedes will discuss how Peer-to-peer texting is used by the Hispanic Federation to reach out to new Americans they registered to vote.

• Josh Cohen from Hero will discuss how texting was used to engage with Canadians and help the New Democratic Party of British Columbia get electoral victories.

• Greg Baugues from Twilio will live demo their platform so that you can start building your own texting application.

• Jon Warnow from Relay will discuss new ways organizers are using texting across the country.

Food Food and drinks will be provided. We encourage attendees to bring their own water bottles to reduce waste.

Pizza sponsor: RelayText

We’re so excited to have RelayTxt sponsor the food for this hacknight! A peer-to-peer texting platform used by the UK Labor Party, NextGen Climate, and a number of campaigns and organizations, to engage and organize with their respective constituencies and communities.

Drinks sponsor: Twilio

We’re so excited to have Twilio sponsor the drinks for this hacknight! They take care of the messy telecom hardware and expose a globally available cloud API that developers can interact with to build intelligent and complex communications systems.