I don’t think it is controversial to say that when you work in government, you need to get used to things taking a while to happen. After all, having 4 million clients means a lot of accountability. That’s why it was so refreshing for me last week to be a volunteer at Full Code Press (on my own dime, and representing myself, not the State Services Commission).
FullCodePress was held, live at the CeBIT 09 conference in Sydney on 12-13 May. An Australian web team took on a New Zealand web team to build a complete website in 24 hours. Two non-profit organisations were selected to receive a complete website at the end of the 24 hours. New Zealand won the FullCodePress 2009 challenge!
Really though, the two winners were the non-profit organisations Rainbow Youth and the NSW Disability Discrimination Legal Centre who each got fantastic websites built for them. And I got to feel like a winner too, for being involved with such a fantastic event, and because of how much I learnt from the competitors and the judges about what is required to make a site good.
What struck me the most about the event was the role that social media played to expand Full Code Press beyond the two teams who were physically at the event. As a volunteer I was blogging and twittering from behind the scenes, which allowed people at home to follow along with what was going on. Although I was supposed to be impartial-ish, it was fantastic to see the support the New Zealand team the Code Blacks got on twitter, including a large number of people who changed their icons:
It really made the world seem a little smaller, and it’s really interesting to keep checking the #fcp09 tag on Twitter, and see for instance, that Courtney from the Code Blacks (who also has a fascinating but unrelated twitter feed from the National Library) is still editing the content of the Rainbow Youth site, because she’s such a professional. I love that an event can be so inspirational to professionals who are at the top of their game, and I love that it can produce such great results. But I’m wondering - does it take a cross-Tasman competition to get people to work for a charity, or is there something that we could all do in our daily lives that would both challenge us and help others? Is there something that government could do via the use of new technologies to make it easier for charities to reap the benefits of crowd-sourcing? How about crowd-sourcing to improve government services and sites as well?
2 Comments
Great to meet you Jo. As a fellow volunteer at the event, I shared all of these sentiments (except the bit about the damn kiwis winning again!)
It was great meeting you too, Mathew. Perhaps next year Australia might finally come away with the trophy - or maybe third time’s a charm for us…