Chi Hack Night 600 Episode - Ideathon!

August 6th, 2024 marks the 600th episode of Chi Hack Night! For this very special in-person Hack Night, we will have an ideathon! An ideathon is an event where people of diverse backgrounds come together into teams to generate and refine ideas around a small number of guiding themes. Teams will present their ideas, and then by community vote the most creative will receive prizes! This event will be in person, but you can also tune in via our usual livestream, which will begin at 6:30 CDT. Below is a schedule for the evening’s event. 

6:00-6:30: Doors open and dinner 

At 6:00 doors will open. At the door, folks will be encouraged to choose color-coded persona stickers, which are inspired by IDEO’s ten faces of innovation. There are three broad categories of personas that indicate preferences for ways of working: 

• learning (who gather knowledge about new perspectives and question assumptions) 
• organizing (who are savvy at getting teams to pull together and get to a consensus) 
• building (who turn the team’s work into a compelling completed artifact). 

Then until 6:30, socialize, touch base, and grab food! 

6:30-7:00: 3-word intros, community announcements.

At 6:30 we will begin our traditional 3-word intros, and hear announcements from the Chi Hack Night community. 

7:00-7:15: Ideathon kickoff and team 

At 7:00, we will kick off the ideathon. We will describe our three themes to guide the ideathon (below). Then there will be time for everyone to assemble into their teams. Teams should be diverse, including that every team should have at least one from each persona. Teams may choose any of the three themes to pursue. Teams should plan to present their ideas in the form of a Google Slide Deck. 

• Theme #1: Civic technology in 2070. You are invited to speculatively imagine the future of technology, data, and democracy in the city of Chicago in the year 2070, in the form of a story. For your story, you may draw on elements (characters, plot, conflicts, technologies) that are familiar to civic technology today and project them to the year 2070, or invent entirely hypothetical ones. Your story might depict a desired future (a utopic), a future you wish to forestall (a dystopia), or something in between. 
• Theme #2: Resisting technology. This prompt is about resisting technology. This prompt is in the spirit of the Luddites of rural England in 1810, who organized guerrilla raids to destroy machine factories and re-invent them to better serve the people. For this prompt, you are invited to pick a technology that you see as problematic, to engage in evaluating its harms, and to brainstorm ideas for how tech workers can resist them with communities. 
• Theme #3: Useless technology. This prompt is about making a useless technology. For this prompt, you are invited to come up with a useless technology and flesh out the details of its execution. Include reasons why it is useless and for whom. The technology may be whimsical, funny, redundant, or be for a very specific use case. This prompt is a reflection on what exactly counts as “useful” in technology today. 

7:15-8:30: Brainstorming and refining

Then teams will then get the following hour to brainstorm and refine their ideas. Chi Hack Night will announce the time at the halfway point and at 10 minutes left. 

8:30-9: Presentations

Then all of the teams will present their ideas! We will proceed in order of the three themes. 

9-9:15: Prizes!

At 9 we will vote for presentations to win prizes along a few categories, and then we will announce the winners! 

As always our Code of Conduct will be in effect for this event. 

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

TeamWorking at TechNexus, 20 North Upper Wacker Drive, Chicago, United States