Tag: hackathon

Introducing the Random Hack of Kindness (RHoK)

tl;dr:

We think that Hackathons in Africa are enjoying mixed results:
There are opportunities which are being missed by focusing on the wrong problems.
There are lack of skills around Shipping Product.
There are also skills gaps around determining the business case of projects / problems etc.

There are of course exceptions to this, thankfully (!), but by and large we’re thinking that by focusing on workplace relevant skills, and problems which can product viable businesses, a Hackathon could have more long term value to the people who participate.

We don’t think that it’s our place to take sides on specific Technologies, and we don’t really want to replicate what other people are already doing.

Which is why the Tech4Africa Hackathons moving forward will do 4 things only:

  1. Focus on one utility problem which is local & relevant
  2. Include collaboration technology and business case skills transfer for everyone
  3. Focus on User Experience – this is the key driver for adoption and is largely ignored
  4. Result in Shipping an MVP Proof of Concept

Background:

Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs
Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs
Internet Heirarchy
Internet Heirarchy

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what the opportunities are in Africa right now, and what’s clear is that it’s not going to play out the same way it has in the “developed” world until now.  The reason is that when you look at the building blocks of the internet, there are clear un-met challenges which make those opportunities both different and harder.

When you dissect the landscape using Maslow as your reference point, and then you overlay that with the mobile market data, we think that the major differentiation will be:

  1. most everything is going to happen on a mobile device rather than on a desktop PC;
  2. whilst the rest of the “developed” world is focusing on top of the pyramid problems around self-actualisation, creativity, problem solving, authenticity and spontaneity (as memes for products), the African market still has pretty much all the layers of the pyramid left as opportunities, with the bottom of the pyramid still largely untapped.

When you dissect the opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid, you’ll find that they are primarily “utility” problems which exist in the lives of people everywhere, every day, in all markets.

For example: most diagrams will show “internet” or “wifi” as the base of the pyramid, and as such is probably the biggest opportunity (which is why the Telcos are so dominant in people’s lives).

Maslow in the Internet Age.
Maslow in the Internet Age.

So this is what has led to our mantra of:

Want to build big tech product for Africa?

  1. Focus on product with daily value for user. This is the utility & viability part.
  2. Mobile first. This is the market demographic & adoption part.
  3. Make it easy to share. This is the common sense part.
  4. Make sure cash-flow has you in it. This is the “Don’t waste your time” part.

So, when you unpack this, we see examples (these are simple ones) coming out of:

  • Education: I want to add to or complete my education
  • Transport: I want to be somewhere on time / I need to inform my employer / I need a lift
  • Utilities: I want water / gas / electricity / housing
  • Personal finance: I want to make a payment / I want to send money to my family who live far away
  • Employment: I want to work to earn an income / I have jobs to offer
  • Information: I want to know what is going on around me
  • Family: Where are my family? Are they safe?

When applied to communities and devices (Internet of Things), some examples could be around:

  • Medical devices which are designed for low-resource hospitals
  • Infant phototherapy / General health issues
  • Smoke alerts
  • Air quality
  • Using 3G to connect communities and make them aware (using something like BRCK – https://www.brck.com/)
  • Tablet devices pre-configured for education and learning
  • Community security via drones
  • Smart metering applications (eg: energy usage)
  • Community / family communication (single button modes, not Group chat)

So we’re not going to be encouraging an “Uber / Facebook / LinkedIn / Buzzfeed / Slack etc for Africa” – what’s the point?

Solutions:

Maslow's Heirarchy of Software Development
Maslow’s Heirarchy of Software Development

So, instead of following the usual Hackathon experience you can find anywhere, our approach moving forward will be different:

  1. We’re going to give clear direction on a product that could become a business.
  2. The RHOK will focus on problems which occur in everyday life (this is where the business value is).
  3. It will solve something which will mean people will talk about it (because it has given them value).
  4. There will be a reasonable vision of adding transactions for cash flow, although this won’t be the focus for the RHOK itself.
  5. Everyone will work together as a team.
  6. The development focus will be on executing for mobile devices.
  7. We WILL ship an MVP product in 2 days.
  8. All skills learnt over the two days will transfer to the workplace.

And instead of focussing on the usual set of development skills (or taking sides on what stack to focus on), we’re going to focus on skills which enable collaboration in teams and shipping code and realising something beyond the Hackathon:

  • GIT (source control)
  • Continuous Integration (CI – easy stress free deployments)
  • App architecture (essential for teamwork)
  • App business case (just, essential)

We’ve engaged with Microsoft who have the vision to believe in what we’re doing, and they are going to help with:

  • Cloud servers on  Azure – The machines will be small but adequate, and limited to the Hackathons.
  • Cloud training help, eg: how to build machines running Linux/Win/MySQL,IoT, etc on Azure.
  • Free online training via Microsoft Virtual Academy.

Execution:

For anyone attending, this is roughly what to expect:

  • We will announce the problem / focus area of the Hackathon
  • This will more than likely be a single page, Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach
  • Explain what viable use & business cases mean
  • Group everyone into teams of logical skill sets
  • Go through application architecture & needs
  • Assign responsibilities
  • Push first code to Github
  • Setup servers to push & pull code
  • Review progress every 3 to 4 hours
  • Setup a booth to record teamwork & results for everyone to see

And the rewards will be:

  1. At the RHoK:
    1. Learn new skills
    2. Learn how to ship  a product in 2 days
    3. Meet new people
  2. Present at Tech4Africa Day 2
  3. From Microsoft:
    1. BizSpark / Azure offers
    2. Demo of Azure Cloud setup for learning
    3. Small Azure instances to attendees who participate in the RHOK.
    4. Free training vouchers for their Virtual Training Academy

Summary:

We’re really excited by what this will produce, and we’re looking forward to rolling this out across all of the cities we go to.  See you there!

What to expect from a Tech4Africa Hackathon?

In a recent post regards Hackathons we talked a little about what we think Hackathons should be about. So in this post, we’re going to go into a little more detail, to make things a bit clearer. Applies primarily to: #JoziHack | #CptHack.

Enter the dragon

WillCodeHTMLForFoodFirst, we make the assumption that most people who code for a living these days are in the typical corporate 60 / 30 / 10 trap.  That is, 60% of their work is uninteresting / lacks stimulation, 30% is kinda interesting, and then perhaps 10% is the icing on the cake, the really co0l w00t, w00t, super interesting, I wanna do more kinda stuff. It’s not abnormal, so we’re not trying to change that – but we can offer a nice distraction 😉

511292936_e0b87fcd70Secondly, we make the assumption that most devs work in teams that are less than 10 people (and if they’re lucky the team is 50% real developers / engineers), and so their proximity to other people like them is pretty low. As a result, feedback loops are limited to what is read online and in forums (which is cool, we all do that), but that also means limited potential for peer reviews, some closed mindedness and narrow perspectives, fewer super technical discussions which make things interesting, and of course simply people who understand that Dependency Injection and Factory Pattern can be complimentary to each other.

blarg-1Third, we make the assumption that most non-technical people who sign off on projects don’t know enough about technology to make good decisions (they’re driven and motivated by different things), and so the potential for trying new things is also pretty low.

In fact, most teams are probably still deploying code from 3 years ago, or they’re caught maintaining code that was written 3 years ago because there is no budget to update. Very, very seldom is there an opportunity to try new things, change old things to work better, or just improve skills. And so the typical developer ends up continually doing change requests, small features, maintaining old code to keep the site from breaking when new things are tried, and of course good old releasing 4 week projects by next week Friday.

So, when you put all of that together you get frustrated devs who would like to be challenged more, who would like to meet more people like them, and who want to try new things.

Enter the Hackathon

hackathon-poster1
So our solution to this is to give developers, engineers, hackers, coders, savants, curious folks, learners, students, designers and even sysadmins 😉 a place to get together and do the following:
  1. Have fun hacking on cool new stuff [1]
  2. Drink beer, eat pizza, drink red bull, play poker, eat pizza, go for breakfast, write mad SQL, deploy
  3. Meet new people, hang out with people they already know and do stuff they enjoy doing
  4. Take a look at an interesting problem, figure out ways to solve it
  5. Learn about cool stuff that isn’t on the radar at work

[1] Hack is not a four letter word

And that’s it. We figure (from experience) that the most important element to this is beer, and for everyone to have fun. After that, all the magic happens!

So what’s the deal?

necktielanding_ninjaThere are 3 parts to our Hackathons, and they are
a) having fun
b) learning new stuff
c) meeting new people
d) kicking ass.

That’s 4. Glad you can count. Keep up 😉

Free as in beer

ninja_deskFor a) We make sure there are people, music, beer, pizza, Red Bull, loads of coffee, snacks, all on tap.

We also think the following principles are important:
Hackathons are free.
Everyone is welcome.
Anyone is welcome.
You don’t need credentials to join us. You don’t have to belong to a particular tribe (I’m talking to you, Mr Erlang).
You can be at school, you should be at university, and you’re never too old.
We encourage curiosity, humour, sharing, communication, open data, open thinking, open source, solving problems, being proactive, being humble, no bullshit, no suits, no ties, no malarkey.
Lastly, execution is everything. Ideas are cheap, indeed everyone has ideas, but execution is what makes ideas happen, and that’s what Hackathons are about.

Learning is good

For b) We make sure there are talks throughout the Hackathon. Some will be longish, some will be shortish, and others will be impromptu. For each Hackathon we’ll find folks who can contribute by helping / teaching / imparting knowledge.

Sharing is caring

For c) We’ll make sure that everyone gets to meet each other, talk about what they’re doing, what they’re interested in, and what they’re working on at the Hackathon.

Everyone wants to kick ass

ku-xlargeFor d) We get out of the way, and leave that up to the folks doing the Hacking.

We’ll do our best to promote the work that comes out of any Hackathon, we’ll demo good work at the Tech4Africa conference to show people what is possible with a small group of committed people, and we’ll go to bat for you with the larger companies who wish they could innovate but can’t becuase they move too slow, so that you get more time to hack 😉

The truth is that most of the major innovations and success stories in the last decade came from developers Hacking at an itch, and then productising their work. So that’s what we’re trying to encourage. Join us, do something fun, do something cool, solve a problem you care about, and most importantly, just come along for some fun!