Huddle Up – Huddle.net's Official Collaboration Blog

GoodHack – Write an application which makes the world a better place

Posted on 31. Mar, 2009 by Jimmy Tight Pants in Announcements, Development

So a while back when I was blogging about my win at last.fm I mentioned I was thinking about organising my own hack day. Well I’ve finally got round to organising it! It’s called GoodHack (www.goodhack.org) and it’s going to be held on the 9^th May at Moo’s HQ next to Old St tube station.

The challenge for the event is to find actual problem’s people have (e.g. Information overload, SPAM) and try to come up with an innovative solution to it. The whole idea came about from one of Tim O’Reilly’s blog posts about working on “stuff that matters”. The core ideas from the article which I really liked were:

• Work on actual problems Developers have a tendency to come up with an idea and try to find the problem which fits it. Unfortunately this rarely works meaning were left with lot’s of useless applications. A developers time would be much better spent working on actual problems. If you have a problem you want solved, you can add it to the list.

• Create something useful There are so many useless applications, what’s the point spending time and effort on something which will never be used? Instead spend your time working on something people will actually use.

If you are stuck for idea’s, we are keeping a list of problems people have, you can also add to that list as well if you have any problems you want solved.

Hope to see you there!