How a noble project started ? and how it got super popular in the largest Hackathon ever! ?? Update: We were on TV! ??

Today I want to tell you a story about how beautiful projects with noble causes start ? and how our team and Karmakurier became one of the most popular projects in the largest #hackathon ever! ???

This is hard to admit and share in public, but my company weSpark is going through rough times right now, as migrating workshops remotely caused extreme delays to my customers who are now more concerned in figuring out how to run their own core businesses through the crisis, than innovating them. I started contacting my networking to see how things were going for them. ????

After several conversations, I figured there are many others going through even worse situations, and I just knew I had to help in some way. As I was checking LinkedIn, I came across a shared post: The German Federal Government was planning a Hackathon to combat the #coronacrisis ???? Thanks for liking and sharing to David and Norbert!

Everything started with a single post, I asked my network to join this noble cause and one day later we had a group of 20 people who wanted to contribute. Some of them left, others created their own teams which we also supported, as we knew that the only competitor here was COVID-19 itself. I was glad that family and friends joined, including my sister Monica, Mariya and Tim. ?

One conversation in particular was the highlight of the whole thing: I met Andreas in the London Underground back in August 2019 when I went to film weSpark’s first video ad. After my post, Andreas told me he had an idea for the hackathon and wanted to join the task force. None of us knew how big all of it was about to grow! ????

Flash forward: down to a core group of 10 innovators, we decided to work on Andrea's idea and this way, we joined the largest Hackathon ever with more than 42'000 registered participants, 13K+ active participants on devpost and 1490 official project submissions; our project just being one of them! ??

Within 48 hours, we were more than 40 passionate “hackers” working in the “Karmakurier” project. Now, we are one of the most popular projects of the #WirVsVirusHack Hackathon from the German government! ?????? All of it was orchestrated completely remote!

Challenges turned into ideas and then ideas started to turn into real solutions. Our project Karmakurier quickly became a real platform! We around 4 team huddles per day to align all our efforts towards the common goal: Deliver the best submission possible before Sunday at 18:00 o'clock.

Memes, social media post, little virtual coffee sessions (don't worry, the coffee was real!) and little icebreaker activities were all essential parts of the mix! All of us contributed in sharing updates about our project and multiple points.

This is our official submission video, we appreciate any likes, comments and shares!

We don’t know how this will continue… but we will do EVERYTHING in our hands, to create this social business and be able to HELP thousands of people, those who need it the most! ?

I will never forget this project and the amazing team! I'm sure many of us will cross paths again and some might even become friends! ??

Personally, I gained lots of experience in orchestrating my first 100% digital and remote team of this size; all done in record time! Now I plan to help others work and build amazing impactful projects by collaborating remotely, through my company weSpark! ?

In this difficult times, noble causes go first! Stay home, safe and strong!

UPDATE! 30.03.20 ????

Just a few days after this article, a major German TV news channel, ZDF, covered our project and two others during a special spotlight about movements to combat the corona crisis. You can check the video here!

THANK YOU ALL! ?

#successstories #digitalcollaboration #wespark #innovation #socialbusiness #thankyouall

BONUS! ??????????????????

These are the tools that I cherry picked to orchestrate the whole project:

Visual Facilitations Tools: MURAL (All), OneNote (Just me, to do the sketches)

Video Conferencing: Zoom (All), Slack (Smaller team calls)

Asynchronous Communication: Slack (All)

Document Storage: Google Drive

Organizational Tools: this project was really short, so we managed manually using MURAL, else, TRELLO would have been the perfect candidate!

Of course, many others tools and software were used individually (Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Premiere, etc...), as well as all the coding and development environments. I really hope this will help some of you!

Please like, comment and share! Together, we can inspire the world! ???

About the author:

Nelson Javier Mejia, is an entrepreneur and #innovation enthusiast in his late-20s, who is committed to making the world a better place to live and work.

#innovation #creativity #future #trends #skills