First Friday Hackathon

What do you think about when someone mentions Hackathons? People are usually divided into a few groups. For some, it’s a capture the flag event, for others its a coding competition. They often get sponsors motivated by talent recruitment, or creating BIG open innovation challenges.

In my view, all of these approaches miss the core of what hackathons are all about. They miss the principle that drew me in, and led to theClubhou.se being founded at a hackathon. I once interviewed Joël Franusic, former co-organizer at SuperHappyDevHouse and current Hacker and Evangelist at Okta. Joel shared how hackathons started as a communal gathering where people simply made stuff. They were in essence parties where people pushed each other to be creative, a place to play and learn, experiment with new tools and new ideas without the pressure of serious competition beyond the friendly attempts to show off a new trick in front of your friends.

To me, that is the really BIG area where our community has faltered in it’s dogged pursuit of economic growth in cyber. To me, this is the BIG piece that actually holds us back from achieving our goals. We’ve been gathering a small group of people each month to develop and test a new hackathon model that brings the joy of friendly competition back. A model that promotes collaboration, and frankly, wackiness at times.

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How does it work?

We turned the hackathon into a card game, that you can think of as Mad Libs and a Hackathon combined. We strip away the seriousness and pre-planning of projects to free creativity. When you show up you draw three cards:

Project Category - Required Feature - User Type

These are a mix of serious real world scenarios and wild cards. If you can’t figure out how to make your cards work, you can team up with someone else and pool your cards together. Best of all, you have to scope out what you can do within 4 hours either on your own or as a team.

So what types of projects come out of this?

A few examples include:

Fit Wizard

Based on the cards of Fitness (category), At least one spell (feature), Pedestrians (user), Eric Harrison created a phone based fitness game that allows users to earn spell casting abilities by walking.

We had so much fun with this project, that Eric Harrison and I have continued developing the game on weekends.

Financial Pi

Using the cards Finance (category), Raspberry Pi (required feature), python (other team member’s feature card), Digital Neophytes (user), 6 of us teamed up to create a preloaded raspberry pi that helps low to moderate income households build financial plans.