After going to a few hackathons, I observed a trend of mostly useless, tech-bubble oriented products developed. So I had the idea of a marketplace style site where people would talk about their problems, and simultaneously provide ideas for hackathon hackers. Then hackers would visit the site for ideas, and if they build a solution, they get users immediately--the people who were subscribed to that problem. This would also hopefully channel all that hacker power into useful products. Does anyone think that's worth building?
The New Zealand Government did. There was a Hackathon last weekend around a bunch of problems that various government departments wanted to have solved.
The people at the hackathon have has a week since to get their teams together and pitches for the next stage.
The pitches are to the government department CEs, so people just under the ministers.
If the pitch is accepted, then we get 3 months (paid) to be put though a Tech Accelerator (run by CreativeHQ) in Wellington and get the application in a state to be used. During which time the teams will form companies, get advice for how to run things, and have the government departments domain experts on hand to answer any questions we need and get feedback from them.
At the end we get to demo our solutions to the departments. If they like them, then they will licence the results, and we have a bunch of new tech companies in New Zealand, with an existing cash flow.
Seriously, this is it done right. Small companies / groups of developers (and designers, etc) get chances at solving problems which would normally go to the big guys in the industry.
My team is presenting their pitch (Machine learning to help route problem tickets in various call centres) just after lunch today - I'm nervous as all hell :)
How do you vet these things without stifling creativity and accidental serendipity? You don't. You have to take the mostly shit ideas and eventually one sticks even if it sticks like shit. The vetting will have a detrimental effect of the types who can even come in the door AND it assumes people know what works or what doesn't which is the overall illusion we have of "great ideas" that's why great ideas are only hindsight unless they are like inventing cheap fission or anti-gravity. Technology is evolutionary, meaning we don't control evolution, it just happens based on the environment, aka the mob's choice. Maybe pan handling robots spin off to charity assisting robots or social fart sharing turns out to be valuable health data? We don't know unless its obviously popular. The messier the better.
That's no surprise: the event was hosted at ITP (http://tisch.nyu.edu/itp) which is a technological art program at NYU. Many of the participants were current students or researchers there.
Indeed – I first heard of this hackathon through Useless Press [1], which is a sort of digital arts journal/collection/blog. If you like these projects you might like their site.
Someone should create boilerplate marketing websites for all of these ideas and see how many bites they can get from people who believe they're legitimate startups.
for the British Nanny Netflix, how do they do that?, do they have a transcript of every (or some) movie and then synchronize the sound? some of these projects are really good
When all is said and done, and a few dozen more presentations are finished, nothing will really be different. The world will mostly be the same. In that way, the Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon shares the same fate as nearly every other hackathon it lambasts.
