Big challenges, big wins: TrueCue Women in Data hackathon

I first heard about this hackathon through Danny Ma’s Data with Danny slack channel, and basically applied because “why not?”. I must’ve been really tired when this was happening because actually, there were plenty of very rational answers to “why not?”. At the time of applying, I was in the final month before I had to submit my 8000 word thesis for my honours research project (full time), I was already in the midst of another hackathon - the C3.ai COVID-19 grand challenge - and I was supposed to be a full time job seeker.

I applied as an individual, and I was placed in a team of five. I was excited to participate, but I did also have reservations because I realised that I would probably have the short end of the stick in terms of setting up times to meet, since most of the team were from the UK.

We had a very rough start as a team. Time zone issues were one of the causes I think, because the only time that really made sense for us to meet was between 8am-9am GMT (accounting for people who had work 9-5), which is 6pm-7pm AEST, and some of the team could not make it to meet at this time. I thought since I was the only one working from a different time zone, it would make the most sense for the meeting to go ahead for everyone else at a suitable time and I’d catch up on what happened in the meeting from slack messages and zoom meeting recordings. This turned out to be an incredibly inefficient way of doing things, and made it very difficult to organise and assign tasks to get the project on the road. Suddenly, we were halfway through the hackathon with little to nothing to show for it.

At this point, (perhaps understandably) one team member wrote a rather long and scathing message in slack and left the hackathon. I thought briefly about leaving the hackathon as well (albeit in a less dramatic and hurtful way), but decided that

1. I’d be in no better position if I left
2. Even if I don’t make it to the next round, there’s a lot to learn from this experience that I didn’t want to give up
3. I know I’d be disappointed in myself if I quit.

So the new team of four continued. I again asked if we could organise a time to meet between 8-9am GMT, because things were clearly not working. Incredibly, we were able to actually make a time to meet, even if it was just 20 minutes. I was so excited to go to this first meeting with the whole team, only to find out one of the remaining four team members did not go to the meeting, hasn’t responded to messages in multiple days and likely left the hackathon as well.

However, we finally got momentum going between the remaining three of us! Tasks were being organised and distributed, and we agreed to meet at the same time again the next day, and the next and the next.

With the support of our facilitator, we were able to complete the hackathon and produce interesting insights on the topic of women in parliament and their effects on the country-wide response to COVID-19.

All in all, I’d consider this a huge success in teamwork and overcoming team organisational issues. Big thanks to Laura and Gavi, my team mates, for sticking through this one with me! We did it :)