I participated in my first Start-up Weekend last weekend and was blown away by how much fun, energy, and personality was crammed into a single event. For those that don’t know, a start-up weekend event is a 54 hours over 3 day’s marathon where ideas are pitched, voted on, and finally implemented by teams. The idea is to have a viable product by the end of the event. The final product’s are presented and review by a panel of judges at the end of the final day.
The team I worked on, “For the People”, walked away with a third place ranking for a service that allows local governments to crowd source their maintenance requests. Think of it as Flickr for potholes. My contribution was an iPhone app that allowed for the location, a picture, and description of the issue to be sent to the dashboard mashup. The working web page can be found at citizendashboard.org.
To me this was a great change of pace from the day job, and a fun way to test your skills and ability to work with a team. I can hardly wait until the next Start-up Weekend rolls around.
