The event
The event officially began on Friday afternoon, where over a delicious shared lunch, people could take two minutes to pitch their idea to the group. As a remote-first business, we also had people pitching and participating online as well as in person. Teams formed around ideas and everyone found a space and got to work. The smallest team was just two strong, while the largest group was made up of six members.
Hackathons are traditionally the territory of technology teams, and there was initially some trepidation about participating from people in our operations or support teams. But thankfully, with some gentle convincing, we had a number of participants from sales, marketing and finance.
Miro boards and post it notes began to furiously fill up, as teams chose various strategies to flesh out their ideas, with a condensed version of the Google Ventures Design Sprint being a popular option.
Participation over the weekend was mixed, as we all know – rest is important! But all teams caught up at least once to further develop their ideas into something they could pitch on Monday.
The pitches
After 14 ideas were pitched, teams coalesced around four ideas. Over the next 96 hours, these ideas were developed into something quite exceptional. Below is a high level summary of each of the teams and their pitches.
Rubi is a mobile app that makes picking up litter fun. By gamifying the experience of picking up litter, we can engage a whole new community who are invested in cleaning up their environment; save councils money in litter collection; and gather invaluable data on which companies are responsible for litter spoiling our environment. Well done to Mickey, Alice, David, Geethi, Phyras and Charlie.
TEMPO is a mental health assistant that assesses your working habits and your calendar to provide scoring and suggestions to help you find better work/life balance. TEMPO makes use of the huge amounts of data available to guide the way you and your colleagues work together. For example, when booking a meeting you may receive a notification that your colleague has back-to-back meetings. Do they need to be in this meeting? Could they dial in during a walk? Great and important work by Oscar, Kira, Evan, Lucy, Sathya and Kristian.
SP Map is a visual platform providing unparalleled sustainability information down to the suburban and community level. By making use of publicly available datasets on school locations, public transport, crime, water quality, etc. SPMap will help push suburbs, cities, countries to compete in sustainability metrics, encourage individuals to push their areas to improve, and will support urban planners or developers to do long term sustainable planning. Excellent work Mazhar and Kuldeep.
PICS is a mobile app that gets people involved with sustainable practices in their local community and provides rewards for taking those actions. The platform would facilitate car pooling and trading of goods and provide PICS points, further incentivising sustainable living. A fantastic pitch by Jacinto, Wayne, Lenna, Peng, Ankitha and Sahal.
Four fantastic pitches from the teams made life very difficult for our judges. But at the end of the day, this wasn’t about winning. It was about culture, innovation, learning, and purpose. The energy on both days was palpable and relationships were built and strengthened. As we begin planning for our next one, keep your eye out for Rubi, TEMPO, SPMap and PICS.
