Hack it in a day

As of today, “hack days” and “hackathons” are a common occurrence. People working in a wide range of industries are now aware of what they are and how they work. But just a handful of years ago, it was uncommon for people to be familiar with the word “hack” being used in a positive way, and indeed I still come across instances where people respond quite negatively to the word, even when talking about a hackday.

I set up 3form, Type and a number of other things during my time in Birmingham. One of my early attempts at the “web startup” was a tool called “Help Me Investigate”. It was a collaboration with Paul Bradshaw, a journalism lecturer, and Nick Booth, something of a social connector. We wanted to build an app that helped encourage local investigative journalism work by citizens.

We did it in a hacky way - we built an app, we iterated, and we started building a few connections with early users. One of the first users of the app, quite innocently asked the question “When will the new Birmingham City Council website be ready, and who much did it cost?”

The back-story here was that the city’s web presence was notoriously poor (sadly, it still is), and the answer came back as “soon” and “several million pounds”. Many of the city’s web people could only watch in amazement when it finally arrived, and it was still shockingly bad.

Rather than react negatively to the new website, and the dismissive way that the councillor then in charge of the project justified the expense, a few of us decided to see what we could achieve with a few days of work, and mashing together freely available APIs and services.

We organised a “hackday”. This was to be my first. I’d heard a little about hackdays at that point, mainly through visting the SXSW festival in Austin (and convincing some other Birmingham people to go with me), but I’d not attended one.

We found a venue, around fifty people came down for the day, and we worked together to think about what we wanted from a council website, and crucially, to make a few experimental pages to demonstrate our ideas.

The result was BCCDIY.co.uk (Birmingham City Council, Do It Yourself) and it caused a few ripples in local government circles. Sadly, though, we got the messaging wrong about the event, and it came across as a very negative “us versus them” piece of work, so the council were quick to dismiss any conversation or news piece about it with “no comment”. Whilst some of the staff attended, few were willing to be named as being participants. ⇠

Let a thousand flowers bloom

Kill your darlings ⇢

Introduction

Stop feeding the beast

Get back to the craft

Let a thousand flowers bloom

Hack it in a day

Kill your darlings

Just do one thing

Go wide, go narrow, go wide again

Get good at getting fast

Not that kind of hack

Hack, play, learn

Explora labora torium

Think before you hack

And then what?

The hack is the message

How to decide what to make

Fail in parallel

Hack It Forward

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