The hackathon is on its final hours. Teams are polishing (or panically completing) their project ideas. The connection to media/news business is apparent in all ideas. Some ideas are improvements on existing services, some ideas include new ways of interacting with media. They all have one thing in common: the dedicated developers and designers creating them.
It requires a lot from a team to explore, ideate and craft an idea into something fully functional and demo-able. Relatively simple projects that can take months in an organization are boiled down with ease in a 24-hour hackathon. Why so? Is it the complete focus and change-of-context that a hackathon provides for developers? Is it the complexity, rules and processes of an organization that prevents fast-paced projects? Which success factors of a hackathon can be applied to improve the product development cycle in an >80 persons IT department?
I am impressed to see so many versatile and gifted creators working in new domains with never-before-used tools. Opticians doing development. Digital strategists doing wireframing. Back-end developers sketching on paper. All with impressive results. I recall again our late friday night discussion on generalists vs specialists. One thing is for sure: the traditional silos and dedicated roles are forever gone.
