[@OKau] After the hackathon: 4 classic recipes

Sun Apr 26 05:41:13 UTC 2015

Steven de Costa wrote:
>With regard to GovHack I think it needs to remain 99% on creating a fun
atmosphere for developers. Fun in a challenging, learning and connecting
way. The Govt interest for Apps and ROI on their sponsorships should be in
the last 1%.

Cobi wrote:

>
> What's the takehome from this braindump? Umm.. if what Steve wrote is
> partly about showing value from Govhack, perhaps another topic could be 4
> classic recipes from the perspective of participants' growth, in contrast
> to project growth?
>

Pia wrote:

>The main benefits of community run hackfests are community development,
skills, gov engagement, more open data, platform for people to show off
skills and launch startups or research projects, redefining innovation to
be meaningful, and showcasing our awesome tech community and the value of
tech as something to invest in. Also some projects go on to be projects or
commercialised, but the other benefits are significant.

I completely agree that the main benefit of GovHack and other similar
hackathons is not generally the things that get developed. It's the
community building, the skills development - well, the things Pia mentioned
really. For me personally, one of the biggest benefits is having a couple
of concrete stories of struggling with open data to use with government. "I
spent hours messing around extracting data from PDFs and made some pretty
catastrophic errors", "I had never seen dealt with data in MapInfo format
before, so that really slowed me down",

The point of my post wasn't to limit the range of useful outcomes, but just
to put names to four specific kinds of tangible outcomes. Maybe someone
else wants to write a post naming all the other kinds of outcomes and
benefits :)

Steve
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