Earlier this year we held what will hopefully be the first of many Safecast Hackathons. Since Safecast has such a fantastic team of volunteers working together, we thought it might be beneficial to bring everyone together in one city for a week to hash through ideas and cross things off the todo lists. While the ability to have a distributed team is amazing, there’s immense value in getting everyone together face to face. We did this for the first time in January – brining team members from Los Angeles, Boston and Dublin over to Tokyo to work closely with those already in Tokyo as well as volunteers from elsewhere around Japan.
We took over two (sometimes three) floors at our offices in Shibuya (thanks to Loftwork & FabCafe for letting us) and worked on wide range of Safecast related issues. Hardware, software, devices and mobile issues. Our data upload area has been completely redesigned and our map now updates hourly with refreshed data from our servers so it’s incredibly up to date – more so than it’s been in over a year. These were both major milestones that we’re very happy to have pulled off. We also walked away with a firm grasp of some next steps. We’ve already begun planning for our next Hackathon which will likely take place in April in Boston. Lesson learned from this one is to have more focus on fewer areas as things got a little chaotic in Tokyo, but each one of these will teach us something and we’re looking forward to the progress we continue to make. Below is the final toast, one of the volunteers brought some amazing Sake from Fukishima for everyone, as well some photos from the week.
About the Author
