The result was that we’ve ended up with only about 30-50% developers and designers, and the rest an incredibly diverse group of city officials, artists, architects, journalists, roboticists, scientists, videographers, urban farmers, community organizers, MPH’s, MBA’s, and more which complement technical skill sets with invaluable hands-on experience in various fields. We even strayed from calling them “hackthons”, choosing “Urban Innovation Weekends” instead to make a wider audience feel welcome.
#JAKE REINVENTED SMART NOTES SERIES#
Our first decision was to completely open up our summer series of events as the first-ever “hackathons for everyone”. ( Hackathons should be diverse and inclusive.)
Here are four things we decided to do differently, and the underlying principles that drove those decisions: We knew we would have to try something completely different than we had done in the past – effectively, an experiment – to push the boundaries of what a hackthon can be and create.
#JAKE REINVENTED SMART NOTES HOW TO#
When we envisioned Summer of Smart - an initiative of three hackathons, two mayoral forums, an unconference, and an event series around tech-based civic engagement – hackathon organizers we spoke with from around the country were essentially headed back to the drawing board for how to leverage the tech community’s skills and passion to rapidly address social issues. Here at GAFFTA, after organizing community hackathons for several years around civic and technological issues, we faced many of the same issues experienced with the hackathon model worldwide – it was difficult to make the incredible energy, momentum, ideas, and teams last for long beyond the initial weekend of hacking and creating. This post, from TechPresident Associate Editor Nick Judd, was followed up by a very well-written article from Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar highlighting the importance of realizing sustainability, community, and civic value beyond a single weekend of hacking and prototyping civic solutions. Personal Democracy Forum‘s TechPresident recently published a post on the drawbacks of "civic hackathons" – weekends where, generally, developers and designers set out to solve city problems through coding and rapid prototyping in the course of 48 hours or less.
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