[Grants] Grant request: Securing HealthHack's Digital Future

[HealthHack Australia]

*Project name*

Securing HealthHack's Digital Future

*Aim of the project, including any key stages or milestones of the project*

The one sentence summary of this project is: We need to start paying for
the things we rely on. The slightly longer description is as follows.

Who we are:

HealthHack brings motivated people from diverse research, technology,
business and educational backgrounds together to solve important problems
in health care and medical research. Since 2013 we have successfully run 13
hackathons in five cities, helping to solve more than 75 problems.

At the center of our work are our “problem owners”; experts from the health
and medical research community who are searching for solutions to technical
challenges. Before each event, we work with the problem owners to help them
to refine one challenge into a well defined  “problem” that can be worked
on in a hackathon format. Each problem owner introduces their problem at
the start of the event while hackers form teams to solve them based on
their interests, passions or the skills they can offer. For the remaining
time, each problem owner works closely with their group, combining their
experience with the team’s expertise to develop inspiring solutions to
important problems.

HealthHack is free to attend and we welcome everyone to participate,
especially those who genuinely want to use technology to help improve
health and medical research outcomes. We’re strictly not-for-profit,
volunteer-run and 100% open source. All solutions are shared openly and
freely (as in speech AND beer). We ensure all code is released under an OSI
approved licence after each hack. More information about who we are and
what we do is available at healthhack.com.au.

Our Challenges:

We’re a 100% volunteer run, digital first organisation. We rely heavily on
online tools and systems to run the event and to share knowledge and
lessons learned in the past. We always try to use tools that have free
versions but over time we’ve started moving to paid subscriptions as we’ve
outgrown the freely available functionality. We’ve experimented with self
hosting services using several open source systems but our dependence on
volunteers means that we’ve periodically lost access to the skills needed
to continue managing our digital castle. We've had more success subscribing
to externally managed systems that require less technical expertise to
maintain. The lack of  funding for paid services (our current subscriptions
are being paid out-of-pocket by our dedicated volunteers) means we aren’t
able to access all the services we require.

HealthHack has always been held as under the Open Knowledge Australia
banner and so OKAU have graciously provided a bank account for sponsorship
deposits and read only access to their Xero instance so we can track our
state. We are extremely grateful to OKAU for their support in this area but
we are also constrained by the limitations of the current setup.
Specifically, we cannot raise or pay invoices or reimburse volunteers for
event related expenses ourselves. Instead we must communicate via email
with a third party who has the ability to do this for us.

We aim to:

- take over payment of any critical services currently carried by our
wonderful volunteers (such as domain name registration fees).

- move and centralise all of our documentation including standard operating
practices, tools / templates, marketing / branding / website assets into
one place on Google Drive with appropriate permissions for organisers. We
want to make as much information publicly accessible as possible, while
still respecting and protecting personal and sensitive information and data.

- implement a reliable and secure email service for HealthHack organisers
so that communication history is not lost as volunteers come and go.

- improve the way we manage our website. We need to make it easier for our
volunteers to keep it up to date with relevant content.

- start using an online, teams-based password management service.

- improve our ability to communicate with our audience by moving to a paid
version of Mailchimp with SurveyMonkey integration.

- better manage our own presence in Xero and have the ability to generate
invoices and pay expenses.

*How the success of the project will be measured*

If the grant is funded we’ll create a more detailed list of technical goals
and accompanying delivery dates and post it on the LA mailing list. We’ll
use this document to assess our position throughout the project.

*Estimated cost breakdown of the project, including any materials, projects
or online services that are required to deliver the project. The cost
breakdown should include estimates of labour costs and/or professional
services*

The event itself usually costs around $10K per site which we’ve always been
able to fund using sponsorship but we’ve never had funding to pay for the
infrastructure that runs year round. Our long term plan is to support all
ongoing infrastructure costs by seeking increased investment from our pool
of sponsors. However, we also have an immediate need to fund improvements
to digital infrastructure as soon as possible so that we can concentrate on
delivering a successful event in September. To make this happen we’re
asking Linux Australia to support us by providing $1,517.40 to pay for the
following services for the next two years:

Mailchimp:          $200 (2 @ $100/yr)

SurveyMonkey       $116 (4 @ $29/mth)

Squarespace:        $686.40 (24 @ $28.60/mth)

Lastpass for teams: $232 (2 * 4 @ $29/user/yr)

Gsuite:             $240 (1 * 24 @ $10/user/mth)

Domain hosting:     $43 (2 @ $21.50/yr)

We would also like to become an official sub-committee of LA which would
give us the level of control over our bookkeeping we require.

We understand how scarce and valuable grant money is so we would like to
ask now that if LA is only able to fund part of the request we would very
much appreciate it if funding the entire suite of services but for a
shorter time could be considered.

* The project team, their credentials and professional capabilities,
especially their history of open source, open data, open hardware or open
culture contributions *

HealthHack has been around in various forms since 2013 and we have a fairly
large and diverse alumni scattered around Australia, however there are four
of us who have been involved with HealthHack for several years and oversee
the long-lived aspects of the group as a whole.

Dr Roisin McMahon

Roisin has a PhD in biochemistry, a passion for science, and more than a
decade of experience in biomedical research. She is a university based
research scientist who studies how bacteria cause disease and searches for
new drugs to treat them. Roisin is a versatile science communicator and
committed to championing better equity and diversity in STEM. As a
result,she was selected as a 2017 Science & Technology Australia Superstar
of STEM. She enjoys building and supporting diverse and connected
communities of scientists via roles as Deputy Chair of the Australian
Academy of Science’s Early and mid-Career Researcher Forum Executive,
convenor of the Brisbane node of the STEMMinist Book Club and as an
organiser for HealthHack. Roisin first attended HealthHack in 2015; booked
as a mentor for 4 hours, she stayed for the whole weekend and has never
looked back. In 2016-17, she worked with problem owners to refine their
projects. She co-led the 2017 Brisbane event.

Andrew Saul

Andrew is a data analyst for a large technology company that specialises in
machine monitoring. He has previously worked as a data analyst in the video
games and in digital advertising and app development. Andrew has a passion
for analytics and open data. As a result he loves a good data heavy
hackathon; the more open the better. Andrew has led and participated in
teams at previous GovHack and HealthHack events. Andrew became an organiser
of HealthHack Brisbane in 2017 and is back again in 2018. He is an active
member of data community in Brisbane and has presented at a number of
Meetups both about his work and projects from hackathons his teams
attended.

Dr Mike Imelfort

Mike has a PhD in Bioinformatics and works as a data scientist for a
biotech startup in the genome sequencing space. He's an open data and
Hackathon enthusiast and active member of the Brisbane tech community. Mike
is passionate about making technology available to diverse groups of
people. He’s produced a number of open source bioinformatics tools (mainly
GPL) which are available on github: https://github.com/minillinim and
https://github.com/ecogenomics. Mike has been a local and national
organiser for HealthHack (http://healthhack.com.au) and served as the lead
national organiser for HealthHack 2016 which was held in Brisbane, Sydney,
Melbourne, Perth and Canberra. Mike also contributes to the IWS-Hackathon
project, a sub-committee of Linux Australia, which is dedicated to building
open source STEM teaching resources based around an automated garden
watering platform. Mike recently stepped down as the President of the the
Kimberley Park P&C Association but is still managing the digital services
used by that organisation.

Gareth Moores

Gareth has been volunteering with HealthHack since 2015. Gareth become
technical lead for HealthHack in 2017 and has returned for 2018. Gareth has
worked as system administrator and lead developer for a national radio
station. Gareth has participated in teams at previous HealthHack and
GovHack events. Gareth also volunteers with the Developers, Developers,
Developers conference and with Rosies: Friends on the Street.

Gareth Moores will be responsible for this project and will be providing a
detailed report on the outcomes of our infrastructure regeneration project
as well as how it helped (or hindered) us in running the actual event this
year.

We thank the committee and greater community for the opportunity to make
this request and we welcome any and all feedback.

Sincerely,


The HealthHack org team.
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