AMSTERDAM - This year at The Next Web’s annual hackathon, my partner and I created a hack called Hashtagivist. Promoting hashtags for social justice on Twitter.

Hashtagivist

Hashtagivist stands for “Hashtag Activist” was inspired by the amazing work of Suey Park, Mikki Kendall, and other proponents for social change and equality on Twitter.

There are so many of us that believe in equality, and want to lobby for social change, but either aren’t that well-versed with Twitter, or have trouble finding hashtag campaigns. For me, I’d always catch campaigns after-the-fact via a blog post, and think to myself, “Gee, I wish I had seen that on Twitter when it was happening. I would have definitely retweeted, or taken action in some way.”

With Hashtagivist, campaign leaders can submit their hashtags to the site before they launch their campaign via Twitter. Then, they can track their hashtag stats on Hashtagivist, and gain wider exposure for their campaign.

Users can search the site by topic (more topics to come!), and receive email alerts as soon as a new hashtag campaign goes live in their areas of interest.

Design

The technological nor visual aspect of the hack wasn’t too interesting. But the vision behind it, to have a simple platform where you would just find hashtags to show what you stand for, brings out what the power of Twitter stands for: Power to the people. When enough people on twitter share their voices and start tweeting, we can raise awareness to topics that usually don’t get covered.

Hashtagivist concept was awarded by Twitter and got covered by The Next Web.