01 All aboard
Fleep is the new tinder for data scientists. After some online speed dataing a team was born. I showed my wife a list of names we’d come up with.
The result of the vote is at the end of this post. Sorry Fleep, once we got serious it was time for Slack where we set up a channel called let’s do for voting using emojis. It’s a good way to keep trigger happy channel creators under control 😊. Those that made the list were
Why am I sharing all this detail? I’m not, it’s not like anyone except me is going to read this blog 😁. So if our team does well then I can look back on it next year and save some time. Otherwise, it can be a list of things not to do - win win either way!
(Another note to self - I’m using R blogdown to write this blog - you probably thought R was only good for ordering pizza).
Some memorable votes
You’ll have to zoom in to the screen to see that last one, or click here. That schedule was for the first hack day, where we met for the very first time as a team. The team begged me to take some photos of them in action
That’s our web design guru Septi on the left, and our award winning documentary film maker Ronen on the right. In years to come, this day one photo will hang next to other famous photos, like this one of Jeff Bezos in his car on the way to set up Amazon in 1994 in Seattle.
That event was the butterfly effect that resulted in us having a cloud server for the datathon. Now about that Shark Tank schedule. There were three 30 minute pitches by team members for the idea the team would ultimately pursue for the datathon. These were
- Accessibility - to aid town planners with accessibility infrastructure planning at stops
- CityZen - to help people find a place to live based on public transport comfort and speed
- Adshel - to help advertisers choose when and where to run digital billboards
The design sprint kit is a method of design that takes 3 days, and we condensed it to the afternoon of the first hack day, missed out on pizza, although as a consolation we did have good conversations with the volunteers from ANZ.
One part of the design sprint was during the pitches we furiously wrote down assumptions and ideas on the sticky notes and then voted our favourite stickes with the coloured round stickers.
To determine the big idea that would be our team goal, we ranked ideas according to client impact and our ability to develop an MVP in time for the deadline. And the idea with the highest score… I’ll get to that in the next blog post. Here’s the result of the vote on our team name to keep you, I mean my future self, happy for now.
(No, we didn’t call ourselves the ‘watermelons’)