Image credit: goodfornothingflickr on Flickr

Do you want an outlet to exercise your thinking and play with creative ideas? A hackathon-inspired event could be the answer. Hackathons (also called ‘hack days’) are 24-48 hour events where developers come together to produce a mobile or web app in response to a brief or problem.  Although hack days tend to be technology-oriented, there are also events that encourage multi-disciplinary teams, inviting other creative producers and thinkers to contribute their skills in problem-solving and making.

This style of event is intense, fast-paced and challenging and good for pushing you outside of your creative comfort zone – something we all should do from time-to-time.   They mostly take place over a weekend, with the ideas presented at the end (think ‘fun music jam’ rather than The Apprentice).  You work on topics and projects that you might not usually, and often they’re focused on social issues, so you get to do some good at the same time.  For freelancers it’s an opportunity to bounce ideas off of others, and to practice collaborating and playing nicely with other creatives.  The focus is on ‘doing and making’ rather than just networking, although meeting new people will always be a natural outcome of the events.

Here are a few to check-out.

Social Innovation Camp (on-going)

Social Innovation Camp “brings together software developers and designers with people who understand a social problem to help build web and mobile solutions to social challenges”.  A range of ideas are selected for the weekend, and they invite people from all disciplines to help bring them to life.  Originating in the UK, Social Innovation Camp is now worldwide and a recent collaboration with the British Council, Culture Shift, has seen the project travelling to Kenya, South Africa and Egypt using the format to develop digital platforms for the creative and cultural economy.  A great range of social enterprises have been born at Social Innovation Camp, including Enabled By Design and The GoodGym.

Good for Nothing (on-going)

Good for Nothing events have been described as “creative collaboration meets rave”.  It is an initiative of The Pipeline Project and is their social mission to bring thinkers, makers and tinkerers together to provide creative support to pioneering social enterprises and charities.  They have three main principles: 1) Doing not talking 2) Collaborate and experiment 3) Support the true innovators.  Good for Nothing have just received funding from NESTA’s Innovation in Giving fund to roll out the format nationally and online. Get involved through their Good for Noth-Ning site.

IDEO Make-a-Thon

IDEO, the innovation consultancy, wanted to produce some of the great ideas that were coming out of their social platform OpenIDEO. Their aim was to organise an event that was more than a hackathon, by bringing in other disciplines.  So in February, they went with a “make-a-thon” – inspired as much by the maker culture as the developer culture.  The multi-disciplinary nature seemed to be a large part of the day’s success, as well as having a wide variety of briefs, not just limited to digital. They looked at problems such as the future of the village fête and cycle safety, as well as developing digital platforms for tourists using Boris bikes and Amnesty International.  Read the full write-up.

Global Service Jam (ongoing)

Global Service Jam takes place annually and globally for people interested in service design. On a set date, people join their local event to form teams, come up with a theme and produce and publish a service in 48 hours.  You can apply to host a Global Service Jam – there are currently around 90 cities listed on the website.

Vincenzo di Maria, co-founder at commonground, a social design agency, has attended Global Service Jams in Lisbon, London and Madrid. He gave his take on the events:

“In the spirit of a jamming session you’re expected to experiment, exchange, and create new unpredictable things. You don’t go to a jamming session to launch a record and you don’t expect the same dynamic that you get at concert. Instead, you just expect to contribute your knowledge and experience, and get inspired by the other people around you. For some rational people this may sound confusing and even frustrating at times – meeting up with random people and working under pressure to solve a big social issue over a weekend… for free!  But here is where magic happens – creativity and good meet up to create unpredictable results.”

The next event is planned for 1-3 March, 2013.

[Update: see Adam's info in the comments section about sister event Global Sustainability Jam taking place in October 2012]

7 Days in June (upcoming)

Ok, so it’s not strictly a weekend, but an interesting project and also a paid opportunity for the right individuals. The aim of  7 Days in June is to show the value and benefits of freelancing to the UK economy.  They are looking for freelance and student video producers, digital media producers, audio producers, directors and researchers (and their assistant roles) to work together over a week to produce rich media content.  By the end, they will have a range of material to be showcased across TV, online and radio. Anyone with the relevant skills can register their interest on the website and a specialist team will be selected to participate.

It’s also worth considering this format to run your own projects, with a focus on ‘doing’ and having something to show at the end of the period. I’ve written about the 24hour book project before, where writers, illustrators, and photographers came together to create a new story about London over one day, and last week the Guardian wrote about the twenty-four magazine (h/t Andrew Seto).  Last year at Clerkenwell Design Week I came across the specifically non-digital 24 Hour Design Challenge from Hendzel and Hunt, where the aim was to produce a machine capable of playing music from objects found around Peckham.

Are there any others to be added to the list? What’s your experience of attending a similar event?

One of the breakout sessions was Developing Successful Partnerships, run by Red Ochre’s own Penny Daly.  The aim of the session was to help social enterprises start thinking about how they might form consortiums in order to access projects.  It was even suggested that forming partnerships to respond to tenders might soon no longer be an option but a necessity.

As well as the advantages of collaboration (efficiency, improved thinking, diversity, wider reach), the session looked at the ways people form partnerships – sometimes because it feels right, sometimes because they’ve been forced upon us.  But either way they can be both chaotic and powerful. If you get the right people and processes in place, partnership working can be successful, but it takes trust and preparation at the early stages.    Attendees were advised to start thinking now about who they might like to partner up with and start networking to develop those contacts.  To help with this, Red Ochre has developed a Cultural Diagnostic which asks 100 questions around 9 key dimensions (such as communication practices, vision/mission/values, and decision processes) to help identify an organisation’s culture and suggest who they should be working with.

The session also covered the different structures that partnerships might work under – from setting up a separate legal entity to give the collaboration it’s own identity, to having a lead contractor, or even an external non-delivering organisation that manages the partnership.  But overall, the workshop emphasised the importance of understanding the ‘people’ element of collaboration, as this is where most problems arise.

For more information on Red Ochre, visit www.redochre.org.uk

How will it work?
A team of self-employed creatives will get together w/c 31^st May to brainstorm and develop ideas for an online presence and marketing campaign for Bracket.  Through a mixture of face-to-face meetings, workshops and web-based communication, the team will deliver a solution by 4^th June (see Social Innovation Camp, the 24 Hour Book Project and Launch 48 for similar projects).

This is part paid creative project, part workshop/learning experience/experimental lab!  BracketLab will also be documented in film and image.

We are looking for a:
- web designer
- web developer
- graphic designer/illustrator
- copywriter
- filmmaker
- (also open to other disciplines that can contribute)

All team members will need to be available on 31st May*, and 2^nd and 3^rd June, and have access to the internet on the other days of the project.

What do you get?
- You get paid for your creative input
- Develop your skills in effective collaboration – skills development, peer learning and exchange are a large part of the project
- Be part of an experimental process and new way of working – explore new methods for your business
- Get coverage and exposure – the project will be promoted widely and you will be credited for your work

For more info:

If you are a self-employed creative, open to collaborative and new ways of working, and would like to be involved, e-mail alison [at] bracketprojects.co.uk for more information and to arrange an informal chat.  We aim to have the team confirmed by Friday 21^st May.  If this isn’t for you, please feel free to pass onto others you think may be interested.

*UPDATE: the 31st is a bank holiday, so intro day will take place on 28th May or 1st June.

Although this may seem like an obvious post to some, it seems like a good time to reiterate that the reasons that creative practitioners collaborate become even more prominent during an economic downturn.

When I studied for my MA, some of the first books I read were The Independents (Leadbeater & Oakley, 1999), The Creative Economy (Howkins, 2001), and The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2002). All outlined the collaborative nature of the creative industries and the reasons for it, and most of the points are still relevant for the current situation:
- Individual’s and businesses’ resources are tighter – if we get together with others, we can share/exchange resources and achieve more with less
- Maintaining an organisation can be expensive (working space, staff, business overheads etc). Resources can be saved by bringing individuals together to form teams on a temporary, ad-hoc basis
- Access to new and larger opportunities that might not be available to or achievable for individual creative practitioners – schemes are popping up that suggest we might need to focus on our ability to collaborate to really engage with them. A couple that spring to mind are:

• The empty shop scheme – encouraging the use of vacant retail spaces by groups of artists to showcase their work. Getting together and getting organised will be essential to success.

• London 2012 ‘Compete For’ programme – enabling businesses to compete for contracts related to the Olympics. To be able to respond to larger tenders, individuals will need to work with other others to remain competitive.

Furthermore, UK government has identified both the creative industries and digital media as key drivers in addressing the recession.  So if we ensure we make the most of social media to connect with suitable collaborators, use our creativity to come up with great ideas and innovate, and develop our collaborative project management skills to put them into action, could this be a way of moving forward?