Re-imagining Hackathons with E.C. Jamming
E.C. Jamming aims to evangelise hacking culture among students in Hong Kong. But what we want to do is beyond just providing a tech-oriented hackathon where students experience the fun of intensively working for solutions. Other than introducing hacking culture to student coders, an important mission of E.C. Jamming is to engage more students from other backgrounds (will be shortened as non-coder) and attract them to join hacking communities, and help them define their own value in the new era of innovation.
“How do non-coders contribute to an IT project?” That is a hard question; however, it is also a critical question to be answered to break the barrier that has blocked non-coders from hacker communities. E.C. Jamming is our solution. It is specially designed with an intention to find out, with our participants, different ways how non-coders can achieve better team coordination with coders to bring positive impact on project quality.
While keeping the spirit of an original hackathon, E.C. Jamming focuses on an aspect that was often ignored — synergy among competitors. It is rare to see in most hackathons that a team reaches out to other teams for discussion on ideas on how to develop their projects. One reason can be that coders often stay in their “zone” working on their projects, another is that good ideas are often kept as secrets and will be shared only during pitching session. It is such a pity! Think about the synergy all the teams could have created! If good ideas were shared and discussed during development, different teams can work on different aspects of an idea and build their products accordingly. Imagine that the output of the hackathon is no longer single products; instead, the whole system, or even ecosystem!
So, here at E.C. Jamming, we encourage participants to work on their projects and stay connected with other teams for opportunities and inspiration. To incentivize participants, three features, including “Startup Equity”, “Incubator Perks”, and “Eureka Bonus” are introduced in E.C. Jamming. (Will be introduced in detail in another article. Stay tuned!) Startup Equity is the system used to calculate each team’s final score. It creates objectives that can be exchanged and serves to bring a sense of competition to the hackathon and incentivize dynamic information exchange. Incubator Perks is a feature inspired by real-time strategy games. They are tradable advantages which bring substantial help in different ways. Eureka Bonus is the reward to encourage teams to create synergy among their projects, which is the most important feature that defines our event. With the special features, E.C. Jamming aims to build an environment where participants will naturally seek for others, cooperate with each other, and achieve better performances.
E.C. Jamming, a hackathon of innovation and synergy, is an experiential event designed to help coders and non-coders to enjoy the fun of hacking, connecting, and innovating. Creating synergy through connection and communication provides huge room for non-coders to work on. Non-coders can use their skill sets to add value to their projects in different approaches. They can draft a plan of an ecosystem including some other team’s project and talk people into it, or they can negotiate with other teams to build a joint venture project. There is no limitation! (Of course, enough knowledge in technology is required. E.C. Jamming encourages participants to prepare before the event. We are also trying to arrange a workshop for non-coders on a specific technology.)
There is great uncertainty in the future, but one thing is certain — people with an entrepreneurial mindset who work with synergy in a diversified team are always competitive. E.C. Jamming wish that the event would help more students to find their own way to contribute in this new era of innovation.
E.C. Jamming sincerely invite you to reimagine hackathon with us. Stay tuned! The registration link will be release later today on our Facebook fan page @ https://www.facebook.com/wecodebusiness
