Last week Hacks/Hackers had a hackathon beerathon held at the MIT Media Lab, hosted by Mozilla and the Knight Foundation.  The goal was to generate ideas surrounding journalism and the open web for the Knight-Mozilla drumbeat challenge: how can we create more engaging and dynamic interactions with news media?

In particular this session focused on the beauty that is HTML5 video, and brainstorming awesome applications of it. Mark Surman hosted the session, and afterwards wrote up a sweet piece outlining the challenge.

What I want to focus on here though are the elements that went into making such a successful idea jam session.  I’d say the success was evidenced by the excitement and conversations lingering long after the event was over- the engagement people felt and the encouragement to come up with wild ideas and just throw it up online.  There was pizza and beer- but I’d say it was more than that.

Silliness

First there was the lighthearted nature of the event, framed by calling it a beerathon.  Silliness ensues, but it also creates a more open space.  A dozen or so round tables were set up in front of a giant projector and we all took seats.

Mixing

‘Raise your hands if you’re excited about journalism and building an open web’ and up the hands go, so its clear everyone is passionate (Note, I’m paraphrasing here of course).

‘Raise your hands if you know someone at your table… move to a different table!’  Mixing encouraged, introductions easy- more mixing, more potential for new combinations of ideas.

Introductions through ideas

Then a few questions to get some charged conversation-  ‘What is something you heard on the news that blew your mind? Whats something you’d like to see in the news? Talk amongst your table.’ And boom- discussions.  As I love to remind myself-  step into a new conversation with your idea foot forward. Its always totally engaging.  And that’s what we were encouraged to do.  People can take an idea, shape it, stretch it, multiply it, build off of it: there is so much we can do together with an idea.

‘Now someone from each table, stand up and describe something awesome you heard in the discussion.’  Builds a sense of teams.

Encouraging play with guiding objectives

And then the idea jamming goes.  Already inspired by the HTML5 video and show a few ideas, we’re given a space of ideas in which to explore.  We have papers and colored markers, we talk about what we’re into- scribble drawings and thoughts. And after a half hour people from each table presented an idea to everyone.  And at the end anyone else could present.  We were encouraged to post it all online- even if its a crazy idea it would generate more.

Ideas included geo-locating news, transcriptopedia, a news ‘unbiaser’.  I presented a crazy idea where you could add a hot beat to a news commentary, autotune it with the Firefox Audio API, and display its transcript: news karaoke.  The internet- where you can mashup cool things to make something useful for < 5 minutes.

Informal spaces to connect

After all this, people dispersed into smaller conversations.  Discussions of the cool ideas and what people are working on.  I have to admit- I’m excited about the hacks/hackers session, and even more to see what comes from the rest of the Mozilla-Knight idea jams.  Such a jam session would be incredible before any hackathon- right before people start building.

So those are a few of the solid measures taken that I bet could improve any idea jam session- silliness to loosen people up, mixing to get more diverse collaborations, introductions through ideas to go beyond ‘this is what I do this is what you do’, encouraging play with guiding objectives to provide both group structure and exploration of ideas , and informal spaces to connect to keep the ideas flowing even after the event.