
Two blog posts in one day! I've really found these short snappy blog hits are letting me do quick, unstructured posts without pressure. In turn this is unblocking my blogger writers block!
Hackathons
Today I met with Cal from Random Hacks of Kindness. Like me, he has a passion for rural projects and for the potential for tech projects in rural Australia and in developing countries. We talked about the future of hackathons - have we reached peak hackathon? Probably, but we both agree that there is still a lot of opportunity to take these projects to rural and regional Australia.
Solving the rural and regional delivery challenge forces us to come up with solutions for a number of issues that support the scene within city limits too; remote participation, packaging hackathons better for volunteer delivery, creating ongoing project development and evolution, and picking up and evolving projects that cross hackathon disciplines.
As Experience Director for GovHack I've been thinking a lot about the systems we could build for better management of the delivery of these events. The amount of coordination between volunteers, government, partipants and mentors across the country is high.
Cal and I talked about how cool it would be to create a model with a collective of hackathons and standardise the delivery and approach so that regional communities could more easily select and run their own hackathons according to community interest and need. I've connected with Anne Marie Elias from Techfugees and Sarah Moran from SheHacks as well as a number of dynamic regional coordinators from GovHack on connecting to do more in regional areas. There is still a lot of love for hackathons!
Techfugees
I met with my own Techfugees hack team last week, they have totally reshaped the project we created over the weekend. It looks nothing like what we put together. And I couldn't be more proud of them! They took our great idea and talked to refugees, lawyers and refugee advocates, and through this process they have designed a very different project. The connections and ideas are something that a hackathon can germinate, however not all ideas can or should progress, but the process of evolution and furthering a conversation and exploration, now that is idea and innovation building! The team has also gotten support to run the project through the South Australian Microsoft Innovation Lab for a year, with that and the other two prizes we won there is a lot to be learned - watch this space!
System Venturing
Indy Johar is coming to Adelaide in a couple of weeks for OpenState in Adelaide. I've been thinking a lot about this tweet and image that he shared:
System Venturing: a new class of enterprise, which operates to optimise movements of organisations working together for strategic outcomes
I'm interested in the networks that we build to create synthesis, or even collaboration for that matter. Digital platforms are still very two dimensional, and organisations are only just realising that they also need to invest in community management. If we want to create change at pace then this type of synthesis of sharing and working across and within networks is fundamental. It's stuff I've been thinking about in terms of digital builds and projects within communities, it's nice to see the structure and some sort of qualitative work around this being developed. Next step is build and do right?!
As with all good ideas, this one triggered a little flurry of tweets on this topic - you can see them here starting with:
The future of
#Drupal IMO is the ability to build the infrastructure and ecosystems that move beyond collaboration to synthesis ...1/
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