Sabeen Mahmud has short-cropped hair and rectangular glasses; she’d fit right in hunched over a laptop at Philz or behind the counter at one of Apple’s Genius Bars. Her resume matches her style. She’s founded a small tech company, opened a hip coffee shop and organized a successful hackathon. But Mahmud doesn’t hail from the Bay - she lives in Karachi, a city more closely associated with extreme violence then entrepreneurs.

“Fear is just a line in your head,” Mahmud says. “You can choose what side of that line you want to be on.”

Mahmud represents something new in this ancient city. Mahmud “fell in passionately in love” with the first Mac she saw, teaching herself MacPaint and MacDraw in college in 1992, and devoting countless hours to Tetris. In 2006, Mahmud decided Karachi was sorely missing a space where people could gather around shared interests, an interdisciplinary space for collaboration and brainstorming. Despite the fact that in Pakistan, many women are not allowed to finish primary school, much less graduate from college and start their own company, she decided to start The Second Floor café, not letting the fact that she didn’t have any money or experience faze her. “I was living with my mother and my grandmother at the time,” she says, laughing. “I had done zero market research. I just hoped people would show up.”

People slowly have. The Second Floor now hosts four events a week, from poetry writings to live theater performances to forums on critical issues. Last month,the café hosted Pakistan’s first hackathon, a weekend-long event with nine teams focusing on solutions to civic problems in Pakistan ahead of last Saturday’s national election. “People are very disillusioned with mainstream politics right now,” Mahmud says. “We wanted to come up with a way to put that energy to use.”

Photo: Zaheer A. Kidvai

Spread by word of mouth, over 120 people applied. Eventually Mahmud’s team selected a diverse group of 40 people, including participants with coding know-how, civic planning expertise, and private sector experience. Waqas Ahmed, 26 year-old co-founder of Opensource, explained the process of the hackathon was fairly simple. “Brainstorming led to prototypes led to presentations,” he says. But Omar Ahmed, a senior software engineer at Interactive Research and Development, said the participants “turned up convinced that they could change the situation in Pakistan,” which he said caused the brainstorming to be “epic.”

Starting with 30 high-level problem areas, they whittled it down to nine specific issues that could be solved with concrete apps. “Not a single soul questioned that these problems could not be solved,” Ahmed says. “It was all a matter of selecting the right approach.”

Unlike the typical Silicon Valley event, the hackathon didn’t give away prizes. “I felt we needed to not create a competitive environment,” Mahmud says, “and as a result the collaboration was incredible.” Even more out of the ordinary, the hackathon invited a government representative to witness the conversation. Since two of the apps focused on reporting government inefficiencies and broken infrastructure, this was a brave step. But the government “was actually excited to be invited,” Mahmud says. “It’s a bit of a role reversal, they are now keen to see what citizens are doing in the tech sphere, and something like this had never been done before.”

“The outcome was mind blowing,” Rumaisa Mughal, 25 year-old creative lead at Pi Labs, says. “Being part of* *actual solutions to bring about a positive change in a country that desperately needs it, the feeling was beautiful!” She explains, “Politics can be a dirty business, especially in a country like Pakistan.” She thinks the problem is that people want to change the system, but they don’t know how. Mahmud agrees, saying, “Street movements in the last 10 years have never been effective because the fear factor is too high. We’ve never been able to mobilize numbers. So we’re asking, what can activism look like?”

Over the hackathon weekend, activism looked like an official document checklist to improve citizen and government communications, a government office locator, a map of hospital occupancy and facilities. A local mobile company sponsored food for the weekend and made an API available to all the teams, not without self-interest – in Pakistan, many don’t have access to computers and the internet, so all the apps included an SMS component as well.

Mughal thinks the hackathon is good start, giving “people hope that anyone can become a part of this revolution,” she says. “It gives people authority to become a part of the system, take ownership and bring change, instead of just bad mouthing the government.” Post-hackthon, participants have formed a private Facebook group, and four of the teams are continuing the projects they began over the weekend. Pakistan’s Software Houses Association has a social innovation fund in collaboration with Google, and they’ve invited The Second Floor participants to apply for the fund. Mahmud says that if the developers are serious, she’ll continue to try to help the teams try to find potential investors.

Sabeen Mahmud (center) engages attendees during Pakistan's first hackathon. Photo: Zaheer A. Kidvai

But Umair Munir Chachar, a 20 year-old participant says, “we need more, and on a larger scale.” Ahmed echoed the sentiment, saying, “Since Pakistan is so underdeveloped, there is an immense room for growth. Immense is an understatement. The experiment has been conducted all over the west and results are in, technology can shape society for the better if we try.” He says, “We are just a bit late, but we're catching up fast. Serious investors should somehow overcome the knee-jerk fear reaction to Pakistan and look under the surface.”

“It’s very gratifying,” Mahmud says of the enthusiasm post-hackathon. “I felt so hopeless about this country, and then when I started meeting people here we got strength from each other. Everyone’s going through their own issues, but everyone’s trying to build things.”

But she also thinks technology can make it too easy to feel like an activist. “The democratization of technology also provides a platform for the super-efficient perpetuation of mediocrity.” Mahmud’s interested in making real social change, and is willing to take risks most wouldn’t. When Valentine’s Day was banned this year in Pakistan, she launched an online protest, encouraging people to post photos online making fun of the official ban. Since then, she’s received death threats and threatening phone calls. She didn’t want to discuss the protest in depth, saying that the hubbub surrounding it was just dying down and she “didn’t want to endanger anyone’s else life,” but she did share that one day, as the controversy was just breaking, she’d been asked not to go to her office for her own safety. While stuck at home, the doorbell rang in quick succession four times. “I picked up my cricket bat,” she said, “but was too afraid to answer the door.” When it turned out just to be a deliveryman, she “was actually a little disappointed.”

Mahmud is the kind of person who could say that without it being false bravado; at The Second Floor, she’s repeatedly refused to hire an armed guard, a common occurrence in upper-class establishments. “I said, that’s the price you pay for having a public space. I’m not having people checked and a military guy there because of a pervasive fear.” She talks very fast when passionate, which is most of the time. “Read Chomsky. Things are dangerous and bad things happen. But you can’t let fear control you, you’ll never get anything done.”

So Mahmud’s response to the death threats has been to start working on a crowd-sourced hate aggregator, “in my spare time that I don’t have,” she laughs. (In addition to running The Second Floor and its associated events, the 38 year-old “with an ever-present 3 year old lurking within” now serves as the president of TIE, an entrepreneurial group) Although currently in the “arrows on a whiteboard phase,” she envisions building a multimedia platform to track hate speech. “I thrive on disruption,” she blogged recently. “I love and cherish the fact that technology has the potential to change lives. We need to devote ourselves to making enabling tools and technologies accessible to more and more people.”

Mahmud sees lots of areas where dedicated citizen engagement will continue to be necessary, both online and off. But in a violent city like Karachi, “wracked by fault-lines,” technology-based solutions may be just what is needed to get people involved in making social change. “Being political is really about being involved in public life, in developing political will,” Mahmud said. “And activism has to be about action.” If that comes in keystrokes and not gunshots, all the better.