Tag : hackers

Last weekend I went to the second Good for Nothing, a full on 48 hours of tea and booze fuelled thinking, making and doing for three good causes. I've written about my first experience at Good for Nothing and I won't repeat what I covered there. The Pipeline boys put in place a few tools to encourage people to get making faster this time, but the main difference was that this was a two day event rather than just one and the emphasis really was on making something go live by the end of day two - no jacking around.

This time round I worked with GnewtCargo,  a zero-emissions logistics company who use electric vans and cargo cycles to deliver goods in East London. You can read a great round up of what the group overall achieved here but I want to focus on the part that I was working on as it proved to be a great example of what you can do when you apply Lean principles to the hack day mentality. 

Last Saturday but one marked the first iteration of Good for Nothing, an initiative from the Pipeline Project, which describes itself as a "creative collaboration gig bringing together awesome causes with a collective of thinkers, doers and tinkerers applying their day job skills to do some good for nothing."

And so a bunch of us gathered on a dark and snowy Friday night eager to find out what we might have to offer to 3 fantastic social enterprises: the Good Gym, Global Generation and the Great Football Giveaway (yes it was a remarkably alliterative event). The process was simple and unstructured: lay out 3 briefs and invite the audience to get their hands dirty. Dan, Tom and Tom, the lovely team behind the Pipeline Project, didn't over-engineer the event but they did push us to take our ideas and initiatives as far as we could go. What can you make live in a day?

Launching today, the Hackers! newspaper is an exciting new idea aimed at doing things you're not supposed to do. A quarterly paper edited by Leila Johnston, fresh from a highly entertaining live-on-Skype interview with Dominic Diamond at Playful '10, it features articles on wide range of subjects, from hacking time to side-channel attacks and even Victorian hackers.