A weekend-long "Hack-a-Thon" wraps up Sunday.
Coders are working with the Administration for Children's Services to tackle issues in the foster care system.
The goal is to find ways technology can help with the recruitment of parents and communication between social workers and children.
We spoke to a tech entrepreneur who was once a foster-care kid himself.
"We're all going to deal with conflict, we all have disease in life in our life, we all get old," said Brandon Nygard, founder of TWIN. "When we see ourselves as more of the practice of growing up in general, then we see that it's much more approachable and that we're not so far from the target."
The city says it has 9,000 children in foster care and a third of them are waiting to be adopted.