Club Meeting - Guest Speaker - Elle Brooker - Hackathons - 'Hack for change'

Online Club Meeting via Zoom

Topic & Speaker: Elle Brooker - Hackathons - 'Hack for change' - Collective digital collaboration to find innovative solutions to community issues

Elle  Brooker will teach us about hackathons so we can leverage the power of collective digital collaboration to find innovative solutions to community issues and open more opportunities for Rotary to do good and have an impact on the community.

Broadly speaking, hacking is creative problem solving, it need not involve technology. A hackathon is any event of any duration in which people come together to solve problems, and most run parallel workshops.

Participants work in groups on their laptops and dive into problems.

Some of the goals of hackathons include:

• Strengthen the community that the hackathon is for.
• Be welcoming to newcomers to the community.
• Provide an opportunity for participants to learn something new.
• Provide a space and a time for participants to make headway on problems they are interested in.

In practice, a hackathon is usually an in-person event, staged over a number of days, aimed at tapping people's best ideas and innovations for new products, services and strategy. You might know it best as co-design, service design, sprinting, lean canvas, brainstorming or small, agile, business planning.

Importantly, it can be done remotely, using tools like Slack, Zoom and Muralo or Miro.  As exercises go, perhaps its most significant benefit (outside of breakthrough thinking,) is that it promotes creativity, clarity and collaboration, three attributes thought to be the key to future success.

As tools go, it helps groups of people to be 'on the same page' about who 'we' are; what our potential is, and what it means to work on something together: be it a start-up, an established business or a community group. Or a hack.

In large organisations hackathons help to break down 'barriers and siloes' and bring the thoughts of the entire talent pool to bear on future direction.

In open hackathons we open up the business to experts and specialists, and invite them to help us solve our problems using their skills and lenses.

While it can result in some really weird ideas, and some very bad ideas that might not seem like a worthwhile use of time, the process of explaining why this idea is the worst one ever tells us a lot about what things we actually do agree on and tacitly think are true.

Ergot. There are no bad ideas. Just good ideas that go terribly wrong. (Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock).

Elle Brooker BA BPPM MPPM

Founder and principal of Artistic Licence and Innovation. (11 years) - A boutique firm specialising in uncommon projects.

Elle Brooker is a veteran management consultant specialising in the human-side of innovation, change and disruption in complex environments. She finds new ways to get things done, and is deeply interested in how humans go about their day, effieciently and ethically and with a sense of purpose.

Some of the more unusual projects she's worked on include writing the brief on 'how to set up your new commission' for the inaugural Commissioner for IBAC; promoting a ukulele festival, without ever once playing the instrument; managing a broadcast radio station, and changing 36 pieces of law to enable eHealth in New Zealand.

Crisis, risk, data governance, and technology roll-out; evidence-based policy, regulatory change, and how to recognise and overcome bias in software and program development, are subjects that she thrives on.

If you're a fan of the TV sit come 'Parks and Recreation' Elle is Leslie Knope if Leslie worked in Silicon Valley.