Hackdays should be a free space to play, not a competition
The Isle of Anglesey, it’s about as far north in Wales as you can possibly get. After an epic 5 hour train journey I arrived to find terrible phone signal but nice beaches. I’d come to take part in the DIY festival which brought together writers, actors, filmmakers, performers, choreographers and technologists to make things a weekend.
I expected the weekend to be a like a hackathon, the ones where you form teams, get given a brief to work from, get judged and win a shiny prize.
I was wrong.
Instead, I found artists making for the sake of making. Some came prepared with an idea they wanted to explore on their own, others formed groups to try something new. They collaborated to create work using sand, cardboard, projectors, head mounted video cameras and typewriters.
At the end of the festival everyone shared what they had been working on, there were no prizes, no judges, nobody was trying to start a company or disrupt an industry, just people getting together and making interesting things to share with each other.
This is what hackdays should be about.
Hacking doesn’t have to be about winning
Hackdays should be a space to play, to try new things with new people. When competitions, judges, and serious prizes get involved the conversation shifts from “what should we play with next?” to “how do we win this competition?”
I think we need to be wary about hyper-competitive events, which try to advantage of developers by stealing everything they produce or those which seek The Next Big Thing™
We need to think hard about the incentives, instead of judging ideas on “Potential to become a business” or “Technical execution and functional completion” we should be encouraging developers to produce work with people and materials they’ve never even thought about.
Our skills as developers don’t always have to be spent creating the next great idea for McDonalds, trying to win $1 million dollars or disrupting an entire industry.
It’s ok to aimlessly play with something totally new.
I hope 2014 is the year when we see less commercial Hackdays and more people getting together to do creative things with technology. Where we spend time collaborating with different people, using our technological superpowers to make things for local causes, for art or even magic, for building things which are not startups, for ideas which will never be new products and for building ideas which only last the weekend.
