We got a great showing! We kept having to pull out more benches from the church to seat the people coming. I hope our audience found our prototypes interesting – as a participant, I was impressed with what we were able to do in just two weeks, especially considering that our prototypes were constructed in just four days. Internally, and I know I was not alone in this feeling, I wish we had more time to iterate through the feedback and innovation process. Not everyone’s first tries will feel successful – however, and I know this from my experiences from hackathons as well – we are also not good judges of the value of what we create. We will have baggage of intentions and expectations, and our audience can judge our first drafts based on merits alone, and often it’s much better than what we think. Some community members expressed concern about the what next? You all leave and then what? I know that a parallel process to answer this is underway, so that the local community should have enough interest to express this concern rings of some success to me.

Written by: Claudine Chen