Last month, we hosted a company-wide hackathon to brainstorm and develop new tools that could help both our clients and us as a company. Ideas ranged from public petitioning tools, bulletin boards, and neighborhood forums, to performance tracking, reporting, and data analytics. Even the non-techies among us dug deep into data and participated in the drive to build something great for ourselves and our clients.

There are questions about just how productive hackathons are to create tools that are usable as well as scalable to larger organizations, neighborhoods, and even entire cities. Indeed, the apps that came out of our own hackathon were incomplete simply because we had only a day to think through, develop, and present them to the rest of our team.

However, if we place less emphasis on its results and more on the experience alone, a hackathon can be a useful tool in itself to generate ideas, bring people together, and pool resources. It can be helpful in teaching people to solve local problems using local talent to build a greater sense of community.

Here’s what our team thought of the experience

“Great ideas can be cultivated and developed into actual products through brainstorming and healthy debate.”

“Coding up what I thought would be a simple task (one data point from the API) is in fact much more complex.”

“It was nice to see how the designs we create are actually developed.”

“It was really useful to learn more about the process of creating a Rails-based web app”

“Even though I never had any real coding experience, I actually understood the process that went behind making a live app, and I contributed to the project more than I thought I could.”

“It was a chance for everyone in the office to experience the tech side of things and the satisfaction that comes from creating a working program, as well as the issues and obstacles the tech team runs into everyday.”