THERE are hackathons and there’s this: fishers, community workers and local guides building their first websites and planning a social media campaign. I was in two such events these past weeks and it was enlightening as well as exciting to see groups like those I saw during the event tapping digital tools to boost their small business.
Grassroots Travel of Boboi Costas, Smart Communications, Inc., Talk ‘N Text and Internet.org are holding a series of seminars on digital and social tools for four communities in Cebu. These are in Aloguinsan, which has become the standard for community-run eco-tourism, Samboan, Boljoon and Santander. Two have been done with the first module so far, in Aloguinsan and Samboan.
I have been tapped to discuss digital and mobile marketing as well as handle the hands-on sessions on building websites using a self-hosted WordPress installation. (As an added disclosure, our startup works with Smart in a nationwide digital tourism project and we collaborate with Grassroots Travel.)
Hackathons are a great way to build things and learn in doing so. It started in the technology industry where companies gather programmers, designers, engineers and anyone else interested for an event to solve a problem or build stuff. It’s part of the corporate culture in Silicon Valley, where you have companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft holding regular hackathons.
It has as etymological and cultural root the original meaning of “hack,” which used to refer to clever fixes and patches before its meaning was subsumed by the more sinister computer crimes.
I’ve reported on many hackathons and on various themes from disaster to education to governance and have learned a lot from them.
I’ve seen scores of projects, teams and even startups that emerge from these events. One such project is Tudlo, which later became Batingaw, an app that centralizes disaster reporting, response and rebuilding.
Often you’d see projects that are technology solutions waiting for a problem to solve. Many are projects built for fun or even for the heck of it, a display of their technological wizardry that serves as another entry to an already formidable CV. You’d also see talented programmers bent on building something with the latest technology and looking to projects in Silicon Valley to emulate if not copy outright, detached from the realities and the pressing needs of the local community. Building an Uber for something, to cite an example, is today’s startup idea de rigueur.
Many in the startup community have their eyes fixed on the big Silicon Valley prize, dreaming to be the next Facebook, Uber, Twitter or Slack. They’re fun to watch and you do hope one day they will make it big.
Fewer look toward the countryside, away from urban buzz, to build stuff for communities. But the few who do stand out. SALt, for example, makes lamps from water and salt to help the many communities in the country without access to electricity. Magic lantern.
Back to our mini hackathons: it wasn’t much, technologically speaking. The tools we used are standard development stacks: web servers on USB sticks (great for webdev learning) to run WordPress and allow people who have never built a web page before run a full website for their community tours. But the enthusiasm and excitement are electric.
Watching community members present their websites, which they cobbled together in a few hours, was reinvigorating. Fishers, tour guides, volunteers and community members talking about tour packages, formatting phone numbers with tap-to-call functionality for optimal mobile viewing, e-commerce, social media promotions and even Facebook advertising.
This, one can’t help point out while watching the enthusiastic group, is how technology should be, a tool for empowerment.
(max@limpag.com / http://max.limpag.com)