(Yesterday, I wrote a short post on New York's recent eCommerce Hack Day, suggesting that something similar might be fun to do here in Chicago. Joe Rago, Senior Mobile Product Manager at Walgreens, posted a comment promoting the company's upcoming Mobile Photo Hack Day, where developers will compete on "groundbreaking mobile photo application using our QuickPrints SDK." I responded that there was a qualitative difference between a hack day designed to benefit a specific company and a hack day designed to improve a sector. He noted that "It is still good to see a large Chicago area company putting resources behind an event & program of this variety. Not something you see every day." My reply morphed into its own post...below):
Things are learned by doing, so it's all good. I am sure that your company, Walgreens, will learn a lot about how the logistics of running a hack day.I hope that expertise will be used at some point for a broader application. Walgreens may be headquartered in the Chicago area, but with the purchase of a 45% stake in a large European pharmacy which is set to close in a just a few weeks, Walgreen's will have "a network of 11,000 drugstores in 12 countries." That makes Walgreens a player in global health care. Imagine the hackathons that could help improve that!
I have seen all kinds of hackathons, from Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) to the recent Science Hack Day at the Adler. The best bring out a sense of Bigger Purpose, whether that's humanitarian, scientific, or, in the case of eCommerce Hack Day, commercial.
How cool would it be to see Walgreens dive into the health / humanitarian space, both here in the US, where tens of millions of people are either uninsured or underinsured, and internationally?
There are all kinds of really interesting tech-driven organizations that might make good partners. My former colleagues at InSTEDD, a small indie spin-off of Google.org (and Larry Brilliant's TED wish way back when) have been developing Innovation Labs ("iLabs") in developing world countries. The first, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, started with the very first FOO camp in SE Asia. Now it's completely Cambodian run and some of the software they've developed has been used elsewhere. Although I am not entirely sure of the details, I believe one of the public health surveillance hacks was used by the NY Public Health department. These days, innovation flows in every direction. Everything InSTEDD does, btw, is also open source code (related links at the bottom of this post)
Imagine a Hack Day, sponsored by Walgreens and perhaps Google, Rockefeller and that crowd, to develop better ways to fight against fake drugs? That's something that would be good for Walgreen's itself as a company, and would save and improve lives all over the world.
Hacks don't always have to be completely bits & bytes tech, either. One of the things that makes MIT Media Lab so much fun is the mix between bits, bytes & atoms. Materials science is booming field right now—and there is loads of expertise right here in Chicago. How about some hacks for better packaging for drugs and vaccines?
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