TL;DR
Now that we’re all back home and some of us are looking forward to a well-deserved break, we want to reach out and ask you to tell your story from the hackfest. We want to gather some highlights and feedback from the Summer Hackfest held in Catania.
This is a call to all participants to give us their feedback and comment on how they thought things went.
Hackers + Experts = Something Awesome
As you all know, we had two kinds of participants : technology providers and hackers. The goal of the event was to mash these two groups of beautiful people together in the hopes that something awesome would come out of it. This “something awesome” was left intentionally open-ended; in terms of the projects supporting the event ( Indigo , COST-ENEL and Sci-GaIA ), we were of course looking forward to finished products - but getting something from scratch to even prototype after having been exposed to the tools of the hackfest, in just a few days, is of course unrealistic. We will be following up with you regarding the products and tools which you’ve developed, looking for those of you could be regarded as “champions of the cause”, if you will. For now, we want to know what lights went on for you. If you came as a technology provider, what did you get out of discussion with the participants ? Have you found ways in which your tool could be improved, based on discussion during the event ?
The story is in the telling
They say that “the story is the telling” - the main value that we get out of participating in these events is hidden in the experience, rather than just represented by the end result. We want to hear your stories. We don’t want to focus only the the positive end-results. We want to know what was hard for you. We want to know what you wish you would have known before you arrived, and what you would have done differently if we had to run the event again.
The hackfest is about stimulating community as much as it is about developing e-Science tools. We want to know what connections you made with others during the event, and if perhaps making those connections was hard, hindered or secondary, please try to tell us why. This can often be hard to express, so perhaps you could just write an anecdote of something that happened which could illustrate the issue for us. Of course, we want to hear those positive stories too - that time you discovered a better way to do something, the challenges you overcame just getting to the event, the hopes and aspirations that you have for your future work and collaboration, thanks to this event.
Come and tell your story - just reply to the topic with whatever you want to say.