---
title: 1.7.2021
tags: dribdat
---

# Short but very intense

Interviews with friends on the topic of dribdat.

## Thoughts on design

A conversation with @christian

- People appreciate things like access and freedom, but the actual legalese that makes it meaningful is lost on us.
- Bring people in from the beginning to take co-ownership of the problem, they will appreciate being asked prematurely for their opinion.
- Obstacles can bring people together. But people might not really care about the pipework.
- The community building remains the most interesting part in IT. This is our shared mission.
- Start discovering their needs, mock it up in a handheld prototype that is clearly unfinished. Put it into a new environment, out of your comfort zone.
- Put "Open" ideology in the very end, don't lead with it - but make it the fundamental philosophy.

## A few questions to users

Recommended by @vivien on the question of finding a good fee schedule.

1) What do you like about dribdat?
- the backend
- the frontend
- both
- neither, something else
3) Which part of the product/service are you happy to pay for ?
- the service
- the software
- both
- specific features
3) What else could we do that you would be ready to pay for?
- integrating with your own channel
- sourcing candidates
- some other idea

## Inputs from Agricathon team

1) *When you think of dribdat.cc or hack.opendata.ch, what is the first thing that comes to mind?*

- A knowledge repository of future, current and past hackathons allowing to dig into quite a lot of challenges for inspiration or reusing existing ideas for further development.
- space for ideation and idea sharing

2) *If there was one feature that you would add, what would it be?*

- Without looking at existing requests, I would dream to have a connection to visioconference tools.
- I would also like to rethink the way end-user (hackathon participants) could use the tool (ergonomy)
- A more intuitive system for managing registrations (in the context of hackathons) and receiving ideas. A clearer page to describe the event. The current options are strangely structured.

3) *If there was one feature that you would remove, what would it be?*

- That would need to dive deeper in the tool. At the moment I cannot do that. Moreover some features could be very helpful for others and so I prefer to propose improvements than removing features.
- Advanced editing tool. Make confusing. Or could be an option only.

## (Re)starting points

Notes from a brainstorm between @loleg and @tamberg on 1.7.2021.

**#Participation** Is it just about the events, or to what extent is dribdat creating a community platform with 'meaningful' content and recurrent value?

- We can't really compete with the pull of [Hackaday](https://hackaday.io/), [Devpost](https://devpost.com) and their ilk, but we CAN create unique value-adds to tracking your project in dribdat - even if your event is on another platform.
- The organizers and participants themselves might want an alternative/open/self-hosted place to archive their event experience and data.
- Speaking of data, we now have 700+ open content projects to cross-reference, compare and build interesting new things with. This is already being somewhat attempted to by research groups.

**#Performance** A dashboard tracking and supporting all the teams has been a goal of the project since the first event. Do we stay true to these roots?

- A panopticum of hackathon participants, monitoring their vital signs to squeeze every minute of creative juice out, definitely sounds like a rather dark side to follow. Nevertheless helping the organizers to prioritize help to the teams that need it seems still like a worthy goal.
- Plus, when you look at it from a "[Digiges perspective](https://forum.opendata.ch/t/23-2-data-expedition-digiges/494)", there are many products out there for managers to track employees, shoppers, vandals, etc. Hackathons could be a place to experience the limits of tracking and respond to it on ethical and technical grounds.
- Kind of a wild idea but still relevant, and potentially based on [research](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92982-7), provide insight into the emotional level of participants through speech patterns, chat logs, or the amount of profanity in source code commits. Because Science.

**#Integration** Who should we try to work with, where are we making meaningful connections?

- So far we've made some effort to play well with GitHub, Slack, Teams, but there are still lots of maker/tinkerer tools out there that we could scrape and embed.
- Connecting with existing platforms like [OpenSocial](https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/social?text=analytics&status=All), or products like [CultureAmp](https://www.cultureamp.com/platform), we could complement existing tools with deeper/better analytics or ratings thereof.
- We could also do a still much better job of playing well with GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket's Projects and other features. What about storing event data in GitHub?

**#Emotions** Going back to the question at the top, who are we really building this for?

- Open source is much more than the code, it’s about the skills, enrichment and energy levels of working outside the everyday corporate framework. Dribdat needs to be more like [Glitch](http://glitch.me/) - playful! Barrier-busting! Not taking itself too seriously!
- Helping to breach inclusivity gaps through a Code of Conduct, a supportive and friendly environment: what does that mean today? Perhaps we could do even more to teach people to be more tolerant to each other, and also to be better aware of technology religions.
- Make instruments to empower the people that need it. Helping people from disadvantaged backgrounds (think Powercoders) get into tech, for instance. Simple checklists to get an event off the ground and de-mystify the Great Hackathon Reef Barrier.
- On breaking down barriers: to complexity (of making sense of data, connecting hardware architectures, solving interesting problems), to people (Code of Conduct instead of Employee Contract), to the impostor syndrome (overcome incertitude and be a more confident & ethical hacker)?
- It would also be fun to make our own [Copilot](https://copilot.github.com/) based on code from all our hacks.

## Summer of code

Some nearby projects we're talking to about a collaboration this summer:

- https://git.drupalcode.org/project/social
- https://github.com/g0v
- https://proxeus.org

We could also approach potential accelerators/funders using these starting points:

- https://hackmd.io/@oleg/ry9pI0xBP#/10
- https://github.com/dribdat/dribdat/blob/main/ABOUT.md#faq
- https://github.com/hackathons-ftw/design/blob/master/Dribdat_Whitepaper_EN.pdf

Some random inspiration for you:

> _on the qualities of a good hackathon: supportive atmosphere, proliferating diversity, clearly documented goals and conditions_

https://blog.datalets.ch/an-internet-of-open-things-to-tell-stories/ (2015)


via @moovie and [lernOS](https://cogneon.github.io/lernos/en/) / [Working Out Loud](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_out_loud)

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