Help Hackathon Ideas Grow By Exiting Properly

There is no easy way to describe this.

As a retrospective of coming out of the #BuildWithAI Hackathon, it's been a common theme about team formations and team ethics. Throughout the whole process and the inertia of what needs to happen at the event (and many like this one), that teams need to be formed. And there is a focus on how you get through this experience as a team and how do you collaborate, communicate and organise yourselves as a team. Some teams do it better than others.

Once teams have formed (and even before that), ideas and solutions are running fast to the end of the event. The keystrokes per second, the number of different design templates filled-in and meetings hosted is a mad rush of activity over a short period of time. There is a sigh of relief when the team submissions are in. Fantastic we made it. Great. High-5's all round.

Question. What is next? Does what you have, have a life of its own?

Something that I think some struggle with setting up team charters. Not just for the event itself but for exits from the event. This is not something that individuals are not normally needing to do. What happens after? Random people coming together to form teams are likely to separate and go their own ways. It is to be expected. Everyone comes into these events with their own goal. (It is lucky for some that have come in as a team beforehand). A few different questions and thoughts happen to what has been created collectively.

1. What rights do I have to what I've built? What rights do others have to what I contributed?
2. What if the idea and solution is worth driving into a next phase of its development? Who is in? Who is out?
3. What if someone approaches me around that idea? Do I need to include others in the conversation?

There are many variations of these types of questions that pop up and after the hype of the event dies down, there is a sense of what next that needs to be consider.

I'm mindful that events where the random collisions of people to create something is a wonderful experience. We also need to acknowledge that this randomness also comes with the need to have some exit structure to make sure that we respect each other as part of this team.

I'm not an expert in this nor have I have the legal background in terms of Intellectual Property (IP). But I have seen how the lack of consensus or collaborative to exit out of these events can have destructive consequences and the great work of what has been achieved so quickly by this once team, suddenly doesn't have a life thereafter.

Putting the idea and solution that was produced in the centre of this discussion, I raise the hypotheses of:

How might we exit properly so to allow the idea to grow and prosper?