At DiUS, one of the things we pride ourselves on is our culture of technology investigation and idea generation. There are many ways in which we encourage curiosity, investigation, and creativity within DiUS. One of these is our Hack Day, which aims to help us build knowledge through risk-free exploration and experimentation, as well as foster the spirit of open-source contribution and teamwork.
We held our very first company-wide Hack Day in October 2013. The day was a huge success, a lot of fun and generated some great ideas.
In the spirit of ongoing experimentation, we are constantly validating and refining the ways in which we achieve results. So, for the next DiUS Hack Day on March 28, we’re going to focus on Creating Shared Value: hacks that benefit our community and DiUS at the same time.
Creating Shared Value
For companies like DiUS that want to help society make substantive progress, Creating Shared Value (CSV) is a new way of thinking that goes beyond ‘giving back’ and ‘being responsible’. It’s about creating sustainable improvement and commercial value at the same time – a more powerful concept than the traditional approach of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which tends to be more about donating back a portion of profits and/or avoiding damaging business practices.
CSV as a concept originated in a seminal article in the Harvard Business Review by corporate strategy legend Michael Porter and fellow luminary Mark Kramer. It describes the notion that the competitiveness of a company can be enhanced while also advancing the economic and social conditions in which that company operates. Improving value in one area gives rise to opportunities in the others.
What else is new in this Hack Day
Once again, all 100 people in the Sydney and Melbourne offices – engineers, BAs, UX, PMs, marketing, finance, HR, sales engagement, GMs, BDMs, and our directors – will be focused on a full day of hacking on their great ideas.
We’ll still be open sourcing all our solutions, but rather than having a showcase session, we will adopt the idea of a marketplace at the end of the day. Everybody will be given three pebbles. Each team will set up a demonstration of their achievement, and everybody will be free to roam, ask questions, see the demonstration, and (to vote) put their pebbles in the team’s bucket.
And there will be two prizes awarded:
- People’s Choice – as voted by the people.
- Director’s Choice – as voted by our Directors Joe Losinno and Clency Coutet.
We’ve got some really great ideas to hack. At our brainstorming sessions we came up with more than 120 community problems to work on.
On the day we’ll be tweeting updates using the hash tag #HackDayDiUS. Follow us at @dius_au.