When people come together, great things happen. Last weekend, the Hackaday Community all over the world self organized and came together in 64 cities for World Create Day. It was a coalescence of people who want to make a difference in life, and don’t want to do it alone. Thank you to everyone who participated, to those who organized their own local event, and to everyone who joined in online. Let’s take a look at some of what went on.
Nigeria’s power grid is not reliable and waiting around isn’t going to make the problem any better. The gathering in Lagos spent World Create Day talking about ways to overcome power grid problems and improve access to electricity for everyone.
Cape Town, South Africa had a huge turnout! They had speakers, lightning talks, project presentations, and broke into smaller groups to brainstorm ideas.
The Perth meetup talked about ways to administer donations to the homeless. The idea behind this is that people no longer carry a lot of cash. They envision an NFC-based system that will let you use your phone to scan a tag for a person in need or a charity organization. The donated money can be redeemed at food markets, for health care, and the like.
Over in Adelaide they had a full-blown hackathon. Above you can see one of the breakout groups being interviewed about their creation. Among the builds that came out of this are the Internet of Trash, City-wide Water Leakage monitoring, and Local Area Notice Screens.
The Nagpur, India meetup was held at MakerWorks and had attendees from 15 to 50 years of age. They even had a team member video conference in for the brainstorming.
Over in Bangalore, Workbench Projects hosted a World Create Day meetup. As part of the event, lightning talks were given to discuss the ideas being worked on. Above you can see [Akshath Indusekhar] talking about his project to control carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles.
Here are three of the meetups that were hosted in the US. Austin, Texas had quite a turnout which made for a day of meeting new people and talking about what the future will bring. I actually spoke about the Hackaday Prize via video conference for the San Jose, California Meetup. I know some of these jokers and they greeted me with my favorite Hackaday comment “not a hack” as you can see above. And there was a day of fun in Pasadena, California as the vibrant Hackaday community there brainstormed technology solutions and gave lightning talks.
In Munich, Germany, the meetup took to the ocean. They were working on new ideas for undersea exploration. The Oratava Hackerspace in the Canary Islands of Spain checked in on World Create day. In addition to tossing around some ideas they were showing off the stickers we sent them.
At the Oxford Hackspace in the UK they took a very democratic route to working as a team. Above you can see their notes from discussing preliminary ideas for dealing with mosquitoes, cognitive dementia, transaction protection for vulnerable people, the digital nanny, and using blockchain for the food commodity market. After a vote, they spent the rest of the afternoon working on cognitive dementia issues.
We heard from the meetup in Mexico City that they had eleven people take part and the atmosphere was different from what they’re used to. It sounds like a lot of the hackathons in the area are competitive and that can dampen collaboration. Their World Create Day was marked with open sharing of ideas and a strong feeling of community that resulted in some ideas for remote notifications for refilling gas tanks before they run dry.
Elsewhere in Mexico there was a meetup in Tangamandapio that broke into groups and then presented at the end of the event. We even heard from a group in Managua, Nicaragua who started off their day getting inspired by watching the videos of finalists from the last two years of the Hackaday Prize
See all the Tweets that came in by using the #WorldCreateDay hashtag. If you have pictures from your own meetup, we still want to see them so please post using that hashtag! We have also collected some of them together.
Getting together in person pollinates ideas and spreads happiness. It has tangible value beyond a text message, a Tweet, or even a video call because the things said in between meaningful conversations often trigger the next interesting topic. We’re excited that so many of you jumped at the opportunity to gather for an afternoon of fun and we can’t wait to see what happens next.
Filed under: cons, The Hackaday Prize
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