Hacking Words – Bansko Team Hackathon

We Hacked Bansko

Okay, not really. Every meetup we set aside a weekend for a company hackathon. What we hack depends on what we’re interested in at the time. Whatever we choose, we work hard, eat lots, have fun and achieve stuff. Simone makes pancakes.

This meetup we decided that an element of time pressure would shake things up a bit and we found ourselves with a one day hackathon and 10 issues to work on. We’re good but even we can’t hack 10 complex topics in less than 24 hours (we do sleep). But we couldn’t decide on just one so we split up into two ‘teams.’

Filipe worked his magic on developing some measuring and reporting tools for his number one client. We want to give them further insight into their sites so they can get more done and be outstanding in their field. #TeamOfOne-ders

Barry, Christie, Ondrej & Simone hacked some words. I’ll come back to that. #TeamTalking

Tell me more about this measuring thing:

#TeamOfOne-ers made great inroads into a new measuring and reporting tool. We got to see some data presented in a kind of pretty way.

This is how many tickets we received for a particular set of websites over a set period. Wow, we support loads. We can’t show you the names of those websites. Privacy, see?

This is how long it takes us to finish a task that comes to us on Trello. We’re super speedy on some things. Other sites are more complex. More analysis required.

We all learnt some stuff from this. Like the importance of data integrity.

We’ve got a few creases to iron out but we’re excited that we and our client are going to get something meaningful out of this.

What do you mean you hacked words?

From time to time we get requests for pro bono work. Sometimes we go looking for it. Like when we created onepageimpactreports.com, a tool that helps organisations produce meaningful one page impact reports.

We love working with ‘organisations with a cause’ (that’s the opposite to rebels who don’t have one). When we have capacity, we like to help out, for free. We can’t always resource the requests we get but what if we could help in another way?

We did some research. Ondrej usually likes to ‘do’ stuff but he impressed us all with his wordy contributions too.

#TeamTalking spent all of Saturday morning discussing the implications, permutations, possibilities and viabilities of creating a space where charities and social enterprises could learn from us experts and from their peers. Barry was amazed at how many buzz words we could come up within an hour. He told us we could get more corporate if we really tried. So we hacked some more words.

As a result of all those words, we’re creating the Happy Porch Fellowship.

Once we had the ‘why’, we spent the afternoon tackling the how. This needs more work (and thought and words) but we’re excited about this. We’ll report back later.

the team hard at work

To put our other skills to work, we also made some minor improvements on onepageimpactreports.com. Christie used it for the first time and gave us some feedback. She made a really nice report but had just one or two suggestions on the design and some other functionality. Barry and Ondrej broke some stuff first but it’s all fixed now. Simone tested it for us.

But What About the Pancakes?

For the first time, we had a hackathon in a coworking space and not an apartment. There’s a place to make tea but not for cooking. So we hacked all day with no snacks. We stopped for lunch but NO SNACKS!!

We had pancakes for dinner.