I'm helping organize a design hackathon this week. Which is cool because if it were a regular hackathon, I don't think half the people who are hanging around would be be there. Myself included!
What's cool is there's this mix of highly technical folks (think: backend engineer types), product designers, UI/UX designers, and then a really big mix of others - folks with a background in video production, finance, social work, user research and behavior, etc.
What seems to be the unifying interest is finding ways to better connect with others through tech innovations. This makes sense - the designathon was pitched as a place to brainstorm and prototype tools, platforms and spaces for collaborative creation. It makes me happy that there's a community out there who's excited about this.
What I wasn't expecting was 250+ people to come together almost overnight! It's been a whirlwind of connecting with people, running events, and pulling together things last minute. The organizers have been joking around that this is a hacked hackathon, which to be perfectly honest is the way it should be! It's fun and exciting to work this way. (Not that I could do this often, it's a lot!)
Last night, we had our launch party, and apparently the video/audio chat went on for 5 hours! I stayed for 3 and we talked about everything imaginable: farm simulators, self-governance, chains of trust, community building, ways to improve the adaptability between tools, game design, Jungian archetypes, learning styles, sentiment analysis and natural language processing, shared note taking, decentralization, vulnerability and psychological safety, cultivating curiosity, economic systems as the background for human society, tech as an amplifier or accelerator, tech in the form of meditation/mental health therapies/embodiment rituals.
We've got a very international crowd, mostly people from the U.S., and Europe (France, Belgium, Germany), but also Canada, South America (Columbia, Brazil), and then South/east Asia (Philippines, India). I'm missing many places, but it's fun to hang with a diverse crowd - of thinkers, of location, of interests. But all convening to find better ways to collaborate and co-create.
I'm trying to figure out how to partner with a computer science student to build some kind of asynchronous, branching conversation tool. Wish us luck, I'm pushing my comfort level with getting into the technical world, but hopefully we're finding a happy meeting place in the middle.
I'm pretty exhausted, and for the first time this week, I'm kinda, sorta getting to bed at a decent hour… goodnight.