Reflections on the Stockholm Green Hackathon
November 25th, 2011
I organized together with Hannes the Greenhackathon that took place 21-22 October 2011 at the former reactor hall R1 at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. It was financed thanks to EIT ICT Labs. The idea of a hackathon is to get together groups of programmers and work for an extended period of time (in this case 24 hours straight) making things (in this case things related to sustainability). It is part competition, part of social event. The time limit seem short, but it actually provide a time of intense focus that usual office schedules don’t allow. The limit also helps focusing in getting things done and delivering a working prototype (think Tim Ferris & Parkinson’s law). The event was a success, with around thirty participants coming from a variety of backgrounds and places. The quality of the results was great:
The two winner contributions were James Smith from England, who found an fun way of displaying carbon emissions in Minecraft, and Petri Kola and Mikko Heikkinen from Finland, who built a Chrome extension automatically ”injecting” CO2 data into websites. With their tool Remember Carbon, browsing last-minute-flights will not just be about the price but also about the climate impact.
My own contribution was the site Should I buy this? a “decision making tool” for consumers. I also worked with Sourcequest and did the graphic design and illustrations.
You can see the rest of the results here.
The location in the R1 reactor hall made a big difference. With a bare, post-industrial feeling, underground so not even mobile signals reached there, it was the perfect place for “hacking”. Also representative to make a event about sustainability in a refurbished nuclear reactor. From nuclear to sustainability, from heavy to virtual solutions.
In my opinion this event shows how the hacker ethic (understood in a general way as defined by Himanen) can contribute to sustainability, bringing the concepts of:
- Sharing, community and collaboration: sustainability is not going to be solve by anyone alone, share the results, work together. People work in teams, and a lot of cross-pollination happened between different teams and participants.
- Openness: information should be free. Most of the applications are based on open data and released as open source. Openness triggers innovation.
- Hands-On Imperative: doing things are necessary to understand and change things, move beyond just words. The teams created something functional in a limited amount of time.
- World Improvement: the main motivation of doing things is to improve the world, not commercial ones (but you can still make money “by accident”). The teams were motivated for creating a positive contribution.
A main problem, as my colleague Pargman wrote about, it’s a paradox to have a “green” event where people fly to participate. This is the same problem we have with sustainable conferences, research meetings and so on, and it’s a wicked one. You want to do things to change, but almost everything you do in our industrial society will have an impact in energy and resources. This is a discussion that I would like to develop later on. In any case, the 6.6 tons of CO2 are something not to ignore, and not something that anything that was created could offset. Some solutions may be to just organize local events, so developers can attend in their city, or virtual events to just participate globally. In any of the cases, there is loss of the social part and new connections made.
Now we are working towards replicating the event in other cities, starting with London and Helsinki, and thinking about the organization of the next one in Stockholm next year. If you are interested, follow us or post us a message!
2008 Sustainable Internet