Hackathons have been popping up throughout San Francisco this summer, conjuring images of programmers coding under fluorescent lights all weekend with the goal of building something by the time Monday rolls around. Hackers might leave to sleep overnight, but some don’t even do that, and end up coding well into the night.

I’m not sure whether they slept, but last weekend’s Summer of Smart hackers hit the keyboards and the streets, venturing into the Panhandle and even MUNI headquarters to bring their ideas to life.

“The idea is to take an idea as far as you can in 48 hours,” said Jake Levitas, research director at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), the event organizer. “I was completely blown away by the quality of the projects–I’m not just saying that.”

Summer of Smart is GAFFTA’s three-month experiment to bring different kinds of urbanists together to generate new projects and tools over three hackathons. The best projects will be presented to the mayoral candidates at the end of the summer. (The Bay Citizen is among GAFFTA’s media partners--check out my live tweeting of the event here.)

The event kicked off with keynote speakers Christine Outram of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, which created the Copenhagen Wheel; Brandon Tinianov of green buildings advocate Serious Energy; and Morgan Fitzgibbons of the Wigg Party, a organization focused on community-building along San Francisco’s "Wiggle" bike route. Rebar Group’s Matthew Passmore--the guy behind something called a bushwaffle--ended his speech with some words of encouragement to the attendees.

“It’s probably not going to be our elected leaders that will generate the seeds of the future,” Passmore said. “Whether you think about it this way or not, the city is yours.”

After introductions, about 60 hackers got to work, breaking into seven groups. A few teams took a non-traditional field trip in the middle of the weekend. One went to MUNI headquarters to find out a problem to fix (it didn’t take long). Another headed to the Panhandle to put on a community-building game.

On Sunday, project demos and voting resulted in a three-way tie for best project between the two field-trip projects and a smartphone app that links to users’ Eventbrite accounts so they can carpool or bike-pool to events.

Groups will be updating the Summer of Smart project site throughout the month.

Three mayoral candidates also stopped by over the weekend: Joanna Rees, Phil Ting and David Chiu. Video to follow on summerofsmart.org.