By Patience Idegwu
Special to The Medium
From coding and design workshops to Hololens demos, a device that allows you to be placed in a virtual world, Hack the Central District Cultural Innovation Conference (Hack the CD) helps bridge the digital divide in the Black community and aim to provide information and resources to entrepreneurs.
Hack the CD is an annual conference that is designed to develop and showcase new concepts in technology, entrepreneurship, and design from African Americans in the Central District of Seattle and abroad. The two-day conference features a one-day entrepreneurial boot camp and a community jam session.
According to David Harris, founder of Hack the CD, the first year of Hack the CD was an experiment to see if the Black community really wanted innovation resources. Now in its 3rd year, the experiment has proven that it is essential to the Black community.
“Over a hundred people showed up for the first event, and 10 new businesses were launched in 2014,” said Harris. “We knew that we had to continue doing it. The next year people came with existing ideas, new ideas, or they came just to get help.”
The conference invites creative people from all ages and from different backgrounds to showcase new concepts of design, entrepreneurship, and technology. The event is designed to encourage collaboration and sharing of ideas and help develop one’s idea. The conference began with its Entrepreneurial Boot Camp, which offered resources for students and startups to create new or help develop existing businesses. The boot camp featured workshops on coding, websites, marketing, legal and more. The boot camp also included community focused hacking sessions, networking sessions, and featured speakers like Paul Wright who presented on a business called EveryBlock – a software that aggregates open data on a city block level. Wright utilizes his understanding of the community and its needs in order to make discoveries about technologies and how they can impact the lives of others.
“I believe in confident discovery and always questioning what other people are doing,” said Wright. “We take technology, we question the needs of that technology, and then we use our findings and put it into a platform and take it forward.”
During the networking session, Yoli Chisholm, a marketing expert, was able to have one-on-one sessions about an incubator that she founded called WELL (We Learn Live). WELL helps bring business ideas to life during a 12-month period. Chisholm’s main focus is to reach out to women and minorities.
The second day of Hack the CD was the community jam session. It consisted of demos of projects worked on during the boot camp as well as a pitch competition from projects around the world. The jam session also had several hardware demos from prominent companies in Seattle and abroad.
One of the demos presented during the session was a painting from Perri Rhoden. Rhoden started painting and building her portfolio while in college. Her artwork is abstract, and she generally tries to project a sensual motion, emphasizing the body of a woman.
“A part of the process of my paintings is seeing images on social media and articulating music into the canvas, organically figuring out the flow,” said Rhoden.
During the jam session, Rhoden was able to network with other participants and get advice on how to use digital marketing to make her branding and marketing better for her website.
Rhoden said Hack the CD gives her “great resources and access to business professionals that I would not have been able to meet on a daily basis.”
The evening ended with multiple business proposal/idea presentations. Two of those presentations, through the use of technology, were made from Haiti and Ethiopia.
With the help of the sponsors, as well as all the volunteers and organizers of this event, the Seattle community was able to create a supportive space for entrepreneurs. Hack the Central District has a good foundation and it is definitely building every year.
