Earlier this year we held what will hopefully be the first of many Safecast Hackathons. Since Safecast has such a fantastic team of volunteers working together, we thought it might be beneficial to bring everyone together in one city for a week to hash through ideas and cross things off the todo lists. While the ability to have a distributed team is amazing, there’s immense value in getting everyone together face to face. We did this for the first time in January – brining team members from Los Angeles, Boston and Dublin over to Tokyo to work closely with those already in Tokyo as well as volunteers from elsewhere around Japan.

We took over two (sometimes three) floors at our offices in Shibuya (thanks to Loftwork & FabCafe for letting us) and worked on wide range of Safecast related issues. Hardware, software, devices and mobile issues. Our data upload area has been completely redesigned and our map now updates hourly with refreshed data from our servers so it’s incredibly up to date – more so than it’s been in over a year. These were both major milestones that we’re very happy to have pulled off. We also walked away with a firm grasp of some next steps. We’ve already begun planning for our next Hackathon which will likely take place in April in Boston. Lesson learned from this one is to have more focus on fewer areas as things got a little chaotic in Tokyo, but each one of these will teach us something and we’re looking forward to the progress we continue to make. Below is the final toast, one of the volunteers brought some amazing Sake from Fukishima for everyone, as well some photos from the week.

We kicked off the first hackathon of 2013 today in Tokyo. In many ways today was a planning session for what the rest of the week will look like. We ran through the issues lists on several key Safecast repositories on GitHub and created some milestones of things we’d like to solve this week, as well as discussed what new needs to happen and when it needs to happen by. Some of the team is still rolling into town and I expect the next few days to increase in productivity and intensity. With people flying in to Tokyo from Dublin, Boston, Los Angeles and joining with those from all over Japan it’s fantastic to get everyone into one room to brainstorm, problem solve and plan courses of action. I know we have a spectacular collection of talent working on this project, but days like today make it so apparent.

I’m incredibly excited to see what this week brings, we’ll be updating as we go and broadcasting parts live here and there for people who might like to join. Follow @safecast on twitter for specific info when we do it.

At Safecast, we have been talking about our distributed team(s) and how beneficial it is when we can get people in the same room to actually hack on things. Not just bring each other up to date on what we’ve been working on, but actually get our hands dirty and build stuff. And then when we go back to our corners of the world the motivation from that progress helps keeps things moving. Upon realizing this we decided that we really needed to start having regular hackathons. Tentatively, we’ll have 4 a year, one in each quarter and each time in a different location around the world. That’s the idea anyway, we’ll see how it plays out in practice, but for the moment we have the first one to announce:

In January, we’ll meet up in Tokyo for a week and take a big bit out of our collective to do lists. We’ll start with the public GitHub issues and move on to new issues as they arise. And while a hackathon is kind of without structure, we’ll have some kind of opening event where we set up some goals and directions, and some closing event where we see how well we did. This will take place physically in Tokyo, but we’re going to try to live stream some of it as well as use IRC and shared web based documents to allow anyone from anywhere to participate if they feel motivated. I’ve put up a google doc with some tentative details – if you’d like to participate please check that out and add your info. I hope this will be the start of something awesome.