Hackathon, a word I had often associated with “cool stuffs”. I would often think of that scene in Social Network where Mark Zuckerberg was trying to recruit new members for Facebook by having them hack a server while taking shots at intervals. Like fog, that picture faded away as the days came and went during IFA’s hackathon. By the way, a hackathon is a design sprint like event, involving programmers, designers, project managers, domain experts etc. collaborating on software projects.
Key words here are “design sprint” and "collaborate". These are the themes that is woven into the activities of IFA’s hackathon. We were trained and then applied the concepts of design thinking framework to a problem in Nigeria. Design thinking framework is a 5-stage process that unlocks creativity and critical thinking to solve problems. The process is iterative with multiple back and forth between the stages. The stages are; empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test stage. And we applied this framework to the hackathon over a 3-week period.
Week 1 - Empathize
The teams were formed based on 60-seonds pitch by the fellows. The ideas clustered around 5 issue areas. The issue area I chose was Social Impact and Education. I was particularly intrigued by the idea of enabling access to quality education for out of school kids in Nigeria. And hence was teamed with fellows of similar passion.
Once teams were established, we moved into Primary Market Research. This formed the Empathize phase of the design thinking process. We identified key end users and target customers – Out of school kids, their parents, potential sponsors and school teachers. Interviewing several of them shed insights into areas of this issue. I had written about the experience here. One key insight for me was the understanding that some of the kids would like to be educated and still be able to earn a bit of income so as not be an economic burden to their parents.
Week 2 – Define and Ideate
During week 2, the highly iterative nature of the design thinking process was evident. We cycled back and forth between defining the problem statement using several techniques (e.g. how might we), ideating how best to tackle new insights and perspectives that emerged as we defined and redefined the problem statement. We also quickly prototyped the different ideas and settled for a platform to connect sponsors/ philanthropists/ CSR arm of firms to out of school kid’s potential kids. You can read more about it here.
Week 3 – Prototype and Test
We had to prototype the solution in a format that allowed users to interact with it. We opted for Balsamiq’s wireframes exported as a PDF file. This allowed for easy transfer between and enabled feedback. The prototype was low fidelity and gave a feel for how the platform is supposed to function. We tested with a few individuals and incorporated the feedback. You can read more about it here.
Pitch Day
All this amazing work and effort would be poorly appreciated if we couldn’t properly communicate our solution to the judges that came to the hackathon presentation day. We learnt how to create pitch decks. The sort of visuals that drives home our points, the stories that draw in the listener into our perspective of the problem and lead to a better place aided by the solution. We practiced, rehearsed made adjustments and waited for the D-day.
On pitch day, we presented our solution to a team of judges from Harvard and MIT. We argued our case for the need for a simple, responsible, trackable, transparent means for a potential sponsor to enable a child to study. We outlined how the kids would be profiled and prioritized in partnership with community champions, participating schools and organizations. We concluded with the call to everyone, and anyone to rebuild Nigeria by sponsoring a child to school.