Reverse Hackathon: Rethink and improve existing technology

From HackMentalHealth, host of the world's largest mental health hackathon... It's time to rethink technology.  It is clear that there are many unintended consequences of existing technology on our mental and emotional health. How can we better design or enhance these apps to mitigate their potential downsides while still enabling everyone to fully enjoy their upsides? Let's come together to majorly redesign tech tools in a more meaningful, socially responsible way, leveraging the power of a truly interdisciplinary dialogue, including academics, designers, ethicists, computer scientists, psychologists, entrepreneurs, educators, and many more. The final product for this hackathon is a 5 minute product proposal to humanely redesign an existing technology. Sponsored by Therachat.io, Google, Greytlock, and more.  All admission tickets includes food for the event.  Example Problem Spaces:  Dating apps promote self-consciousness, lookism, inauthenticity, and avoidance. How can we use relationship psychology to change Tinder, Bumble, and other apps in ways that avoid these negative thought patterns? Netflix and YouTube encourage users to spend hours on their sites binge watching and getting autoplayed to the next video. How can we restructure these technologies in a way that's beneficial to both the company and the consumer? Instagram promotes trends like pro-ana and thinspiration, dangerously negative campaigns that promote unhealthy eating habits. How can we leverage ethics and psychology to redesign these infinite photo feeds to prevent the propagation of these trends? REVERSE HACKATHON FAQ What is a Reverse Hackathon? Prominent tools and apps shape the way we interact with ourselves, eachother, and the world around us. Instead of building something from scratch, this hackathon will put energy toward devising solutions to improve the apps we use every day. You know, the ones you probably used to find out about this event. Facebook, Tinder, Instagram, Snapchat, Google, among others.  We know that technology use is shaping our emotional lives, social relationships, desires and expectations as well as decision making. By bringing together academics, ethicists, psychologists, educators and other social science and humanities experts as well as product developers, designers, and coders to bridge the gap between teach and social and emotional health. What is different about this hackathon, however, is that we will begin with common technology tools and apps and at the end of the hack our participants will present pitches that improve the apps and tools by infusing them with new features that help the tools better serve our collective mental and emotional health. What are we aiming to improve about existing apps? The reverse hackathon will focus on improving the apps potentially damaging effects on our mental health without compromising on the applications core utility. For example, given the wealth of data Facebook has, what are some features that could actually help improve our mental health instead of serve to put it at risk? Website: hackmentalhealth.care Schedule: TBA at https://www.hackmentalhealth.care/schedule-3/ Email listserv: https://upscri.be/edd2c3/