{"id":836,"date":"2012-04-24T15:05:42","date_gmt":"2012-04-24T07:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gergely.imreh.net\/blog\/?p=836"},"modified":"2012-04-24T15:05:42","modified_gmt":"2012-04-24T07:05:42","slug":"hacktaiwan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gergely.imreh.net\/blog\/2012\/04\/hacktaiwan\/","title":{"rendered":"Hack+Taiwan"},"content":{"rendered":"

The World Creativity and Innovation week (WCIW)<\/a> goes on every year April 15-21 (set to coincide with Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday). This year we were making some events in Taiwan as well, first about creativity: Create @ Public<\/a>, and another one a week later for innovation: Hack+Taiwan, a hackathon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of the two events, this one was the trickier to do. For Create@Public, all I had to do is pack a lot of stationery and start making stuff myself. For a hackathon, there’s much more preparation to do. Fortunately, I had some great mentors to get things going, James<\/a> of Startup Digest Taipei<\/a> and Volker<\/a> from Yushan Ventures<\/a>. They have a lot of experience pulling off great events, and I was glad to hear their advice. I was surprised that in less than 2 weeks something like this could be put together, even under not totally favorable circumstances.<\/p>\n

First had to find a place to host it, and\u00a0preferably\u00a0with zero budget. Looking at who do I know, ended up at appWorks<\/a>, a startup accelerator, whose founder, Jamie<\/a> is indeed a hacker at heart, so wasn’t actually that bad to convince him to give us some space on a weekend day. Even got one of their teams working there, Fandora<\/a>, to help us.<\/p>\n

That’s a good first step, now have to get some people to participate. I set up the\u00a0Hack+Taiwan blog<\/a>\u00a0(on\u00a0Octopress<\/a>, just trying something new, that was an “interesting” experience as well), the event<\/a>,\u00a0a sign up sheet and started to spread the word. It all went well, until one week before the event it turned out that the Open Source Developers’ Conference<\/a> has a hackathon pretty much the same day & time as I planned. That freaked me out a little, and after asking around, I got many different advice: cancel so not to compete with them, cancel to take a rest, and give it my best try\u00a0nonetheless. Of course the craziest option won, so started to spread the word even more, trying to invite mentors, getting catering, figuring out how the day should work and so on.<\/p>\n

Let’s get to it<\/h2>\n

Since people don’t like to fill out sign up sheets, and Facebook event “join” is so easy, I had absolutely no idea how many people will come. It was just winging it, I knew I’ll be there and a couple of people who were helping me, but that’s all so far.<\/p>\n

\"Hack+Taiwan<\/a>
Hack+Taiwan logo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I ordered breakfast for 30 (from\u00a0Magic Bagels<\/a>), and let’s see what happens. Around 9am, the advertised start time, people started to come, first a couple, then some more, and around 10 o’clock there were almost a dozen people. That’s not bad at all, even considering that a third of that was mentors and other organizers, but they took part just the same. Since most people didn’t bring any ideas (some even didn’t bring a laptop, now that I don’t understand), had to get them to come up with some stuff on the spot. It took a little pushing, some ideas were so specific and pretty much the same they are working on their normal time, but fortunately there were some interesting ones. In about half an hour we had 3 teams working on three completely different. In the afternoon there were even more people who dropped by for some time, and got another project working.<\/p>\n

\"Arduino<\/a>
Making an Arduino piano<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The projects we had:<\/h3>\n