Can winning ideas be pulled out of the air? Can creativity be grown? Well I've got a new word for you to learn: the Hackathon. In the decade since it was coined, the idea has started to take off, big-time.
The word is a combination of hacking, as in computers; and marathon. It's a lot of people working to solve certain computer problems, in teams, for a set period. Sometimes they tackle specific problems. Sun Microsystems invented the name for a conference that worked on applications for their Java program.
The idea spread through north America and Britain. One spawned a company called GroupMe in 2010 that was sold a year later to Skype for $85 million. (See? Suddenly you're interested.) Another created Nitobi, sold to Adobe for a secret sum.
Some run a contest for a weekend, some a week, with several groups competing and judges selecting a winner, usually presenting a prize or a development grant. If you participate, don't expect much sleep - bring your sleeping bag - and be ready to live on pizza and Coke for the duration.
Success is driving the idea into wider circuits, outside the programmer arena. In June this year the City of Palo Alto put on its Civic Hackathon and attracted 5000 participants. They called it, "An event where technology, entrepreneurship and innovation come together to help shape the future of our community." The city’s downtown was transformed into City Camp Palo Alto. Families came to view the latest in robotics, take part in art activities, enjoy food and live music.
Individual companies are looking at hackathons as a way to improve thinking and relationships, and maybe come up with some ground-shaking ideas. All for the price of a few pizzas.
A group called London Green Hackathon ran a weekend last year where they developed programs on "Energy efficiency in buildings","Real time carbon emissions", "Kindle energy dashboard", and the like. The last reprogrammed a Kindle reader to download freely available data from the active power grid, and give you a real-time analysis of energy use nationally, or within an area, or just at your home.
In June Melbourne University participated in GovHack, a 48-hour hackathon mining the vast amount of government-funded data available in the public domain. Over 900 participants hacked away for 48 hours, developing analytical programs that made sense of these databases.
So for example, we have huge quantities of information about transport, biological data, immigration, trade, tourism and more, gathered by governments and organisations over years. Only a small amount of this data is used, we could learn so much more if it was examined from different angles.
This is called "data mining" - digging fresh understanding out of these mountains of raw information. This is what they worked on in the hackathon, designing programs that found new answers from the data, by asking the right questions.
This weekend will see Melbourne's first Create 32 Hackathon, hosted by digital shop Visual Jazz Isobar. The focus will be on near field communications (NFC) applications. This is the new data transfer link you get when two mobile phones touch each other, for example. A fast-growing field itself (another you have to get your head around).
But groups with other interests can come along and participate. VJI Managing Director, Konrad Spilva, said: "These events allow brands to reach out to a different market and community to solve a business problem."
It will be held at King Street's York Butter Factory building on Saturday and Sunday, with a prize of $12,000. There may still be room, so if you're interested chase them up.
ray@ebeatty.com
