Inspiration
" Finding the right partners and finding the right focus, these are two of our favorite things. "
We, and our friends, have joined many hackathons, hacked hard and got a cold the next week, with happy memories of the results we produced at the weekend events. We wanted to offer to the world a tool that fosters teaming. It lets teams come into existence. It nudges it. It makes it happen. Then it makes the teams move into production.
First, you have to be able to create a teaming-up idea in the raw and vague sense of an idea. This tool lets you do that.
Then, step by step you have to let people interact with the idea while they become part of a proto-team, and we all coalesce into a functioning team, where we agree on our focus and then we work with focus. Add a deadline and you have a competition or a mutually agreed race against the clock. You need the option to progress through these team state stages swiftly. So our tool is designed to make this progression be fast. You also have a place for people to go, if they have a non-core role in the team. You put them into the ecosystem surrounding the team. "It takes a village to raise a project."
Our inspiration was to solve many similar recurring process problems that arise when people start getting together to do things in common. This is true in any context outside of the hackathon field, too. We wanted to make a solution, abstract and antifragile, so that a proposed teaming idea, as a concept, can only be built forward not forgotten not destroyed (*) and so that anyone can use gitimd app to get teamed up in any new context.
(*) A concept once created cannot be destroyed.
What it does
gitimd app = Get Teamed Up gitimd, g't tim'd, get teamed
Gitimd is an engine. It takes ideas, grows them into teams and brings them to become full-functioning teams that produce results.
Teams may enter into competitions. Teams exist first, without necessarily competing in contests; then they may enter a competition.
After they're formed and functioning, teams can isolate themselves, or may interact with a layer of people who've joined the "like" layer surrounding the team.
This "like" layer is a club surrounding the team which might produce value for the team's purpose. Teams attract queries from future sponsors, backers, investors, partners and other significant helpers, so they put these hangers-on into the club layer, and then have someone discuss with them in that space.
Summary
- team-making engine
- team growth engine
- team support engine Teams can do work without competing in contests. Teams can join competitions too. Teaming tool available for use in all contexts where people must come together to produce a result. Add any adjective and the answer is still "yes" (is it good for : emergency, organizational, corporate, association, societal, anarchic-chaotic, etc: answer is "yes" )
How I built it
Gitimd is layers of interacting modules. See below.
Three in the team are the builders. They used Meteor.
I (the submission writer) didn't build it. I helped to define needs into blocks.
Challenges I ran into
- normal levels of uncertainty, normal for an abstraction of this breadth and scope
- normal confusion, normal for a team where most of the people had no contact before the team started
- normal waste-of-time, normal for situations where one must do things never done before
Meteor packages used by this project
less
accounts-base
accounts-password
accounts-ui
useraccounts:bootstrap
useraccounts:iron-routing
alanning:roles
zimme:iron-router-active
cmather:handlebars-server@0.2.0
dburles:collection-helpers
reywood:publish-composite
momentjs:moment
underscorestring:underscore.string
matb33:collection-hooks
dburles:factory
anti:fake
cunneen:mailgun
iron:router@1.0.0
yasinuslu:blaze-meta
natestrauser:select2@4.0.0_1
aldeed:simple-schema
aldeed:collection2
aldeed:autoform-select2
aldeed:autoform
standard-minifiers
meteor-base
mobile-experience
mongo
blaze-html-templates
session
jquery
tracker
logging
reload
random
ejson
spacebars
check
anti:modals
meteortoys:allthings
swiper:swiper
fortawesome:fontawesome
meteorhacks:kadira
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'll write for the group here.
The modules that we used ended up working well, and that is a source of pride. It wasn't trivial or obvious, and it all worked.
Being in the Meteor community is a source of pride because we can make a big prototype and we know it will be a big well-working one too.
Above all that, we have pride in our high levels of ability to discuss decide delegate motivate facilitate and double-check. We did all this at sufficient levels of depth and abstraction so we all got onto a common vision and plan, then stayed on that wavelength for the duration of this Meteor-2015 hackathon challenge.
What I learned
It takes as much, if not more preparation, discussion + design thinking BEFORE the hackathon than actually implementing functionality.
A large body of abstract thought can be modeled and transformed into good working code, overnight.
What's next for Gitimd app = Get Teamed Up
Anyone can define an idea as a project for a team.
People join the discovery and discussion process. Their goal is to define and refine.
A subgroup of them decide, elect, choose, or vote to focus on a clear to-be-produced result. In their minds they become the "team" because they have the same shared clarity. They view all the others as "outer layer" and Gitimd gives them features to support that view. They work and the outer layer acts as an entourage, surrounding, ambiance, environment. This is the abstraction we are going to flesh out.
Gitimd is going to allow people to be pre-emptive and thereby make teams fast.
Gitimd is also going to help create ecosystems around teams.
Team = producer
Project = result
Layer = supporting ecosystem
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