Reflections on 24 hour business camp and the site we built
I love crazy hack sessions. When things click, when you are a working with others to GET. THINGS. DONE. Where you cut corners, push forward, make great things come true and produce things you didn’t expect. This was the main reason I signed up for 24 hour business camp. I also wanted to stand on my own two programmer legs in a bite-size but still ambitious project.
I teamed up with brilliant designer Alexis from Winston Design. We bounced a few ideas back and forth, about making some existing dataset better, building on the different API lego blocks out there to add value to some social object. We ended up picking something simple and clean that we both felt the need for - a place where you could reach out to the Swedish web, social media, entrepreneurship and tech scene for good people. Everyone needs good people at times, and we have all learned that looking for them through out networks is usually the best way. So we post to jaiku, twitter or bloggy, or write a blogpost about it, and hope that our friends will have or make the match.
The vision for the website we built, http://hitta.brafolk.nu, was to use the simple and straight forward posting style of twitter, and the ecosystem of #hashtags that has grown there to categorize posts. By offering posts directly on our site, categorized by tags written directly in the post instead of in a special tag field, and aggregating posts in the microblogosphere with the tag #brafolk added to them, we could make a convenient one-stop rss shop for people looking for jobs or good people among those who understand the new web and appreciate that type of simplicity and categorization.
During the 24 hour business camp, we got the basic website working, with job-postings on our own site. The day after, I had the time to finish the #hashtag implementation on the site and create feeds for each tag. This makes it possible to subscribe to only posts with for example the tag #design. During this week I hope to have time for the final step - aggregating posts from the microblogs and possibly other ad websites with tag support like rubbt. If we can establish adding the hashtag #brafolk to all shout-outs like this one, hitta.brafolk.nu will become a convenient and connected resource for knowing what’s up with recruitment on the swedish scene.
If you like these visions and the implementation we have out there now, go vote for us in the 24 hour business camp poll for the unofficial winner of the event.
