Hackathons as Instruments for Settlement Sector Innovation

In Canada, the non-profit organizations (NPO) and settlement sectors are increasingly re-examining their responsibility for service delivery and service design. With a growing interest in understanding how to include design principles and an “innovation” mindset in addressing the long-term outcomes of social services, new instruments are introduced as a way to experiment with different modes of engagement among the various stakeholders. The aim of community hackathons or civic hacks—a derivative of tech gatherings customized to fit public engagement—is to collaboratively rethink, redesign, and resolve a range of social and policy issues that communities are facing, from settlement, the environment, health, or legal services. Although hackathons and civic hacks aspire to be democratic, relationship-driven instruments, aligned with non-profit principles of inclusion and diversity, they are also risky propositions from the perspective of the non-profit organizational culture in Canada in that they tend to lack solid structure, clear rules, and fixed outcomes. Despite the challenges, the promise of innovation is too attractive to be disregarded, and some non-profits are embarking (with or without the government’s help) on incorporating hackathons into their toolkits. This case study will present a practitioner’s perspective on the outcomes of two community hackathons, one exploring migration data sets and the other on language policy innovation, co-developed between 2016 and 2019 by MCIS Language Solutions, a Toronto based not-for-profit social enterprise, in partnership with various partners. The case study examines how the hackathon as an instrument can aid settlement sectors and governments in fostering non-profit innovation to rethinking the trajectory of taking solutions to scale.