On hosting the first ever Coopathon -the co-operative hackathon in India.
Maybe before I start telling this story I should warn something, its Co-Operative not corporate.
So what’s this Coopathon all about !?
Coopathon is the first ever Hackathon for cooperative sector in India. We hosted Coopathon aka the cooperative hackathon at IIM kozhikode this week as part of the conference on “CO-OPERATIVES IN THE CHANGING WORLD OF WORK” . The program was jointly hosted by Kerala Startup Mission ( KSUM ) International cooperative alliance — Asia pacific ( ICA-AP ) and Uralungal Technology Solutions ( ULTS ).
Acha, Now tell me more about cooperatives. I know there is private sector and government. Hows this cooperatives differ
Cooperatives are organisations / unions formed by common people for common good of them. Everyone will be equal stakeholders, they are called members. cooperatives works to provide best possible quality life to its members. In short it’s a small version of democracy that stands for common good. Read more about cooperatives here
What happened there ?
You can get a gist of what happened there from this mashup video. We are yet to come with the final after movie.
Where coopathon stood different from other hackathons
Common,!! you know how a normal hackathon looks like, a bunch of nerds and coders come together to a place and work one or two days on problems like making more applications using specific APIs. Mostly its a tech-tech code-code coffee-Redbul sleepless night.
Coopathon was more into hacking few of the largest challenges in the world, like poverty eradication. It was more discussions, debates reading coding kind of a hackathon.
Cooperatives are as rich as the 7th richest country in the world. Many parts of the Europe and western countries cooperatives are the active force than the private sector, in terms of wealth and no of people associated. There is a high correlation with the development indices and how much cooperatives are actives in that region.
There are a lot of challenges cooperatives faces today. Mostly in technology adoption, getting more youths involved in the process etc. We hosted the first ever cooperative hackathon to address some of the issues cooperatives faces, especially in the Asia Pacific region.
We had three broader problem domains
- UN Sustainable development goals
- Management / organisation development mechanisms for cooperatives
- Specific problems from the worker cooperatives
Few numbers that made me excited
This all registrations happened in two days after we announce the program. We forced to switch many of the teams to waiting list because of this overwhelming response.
One fourth of the total participants traveled from different parts of India to hack the cooperative problems. Even the third prize winner team coopon came all the way from Pondicherry to attend the coopathon.
The best gender balanced hackathon we hosted so far !!
Thanks to Pehia, we had the best gender balanced hackathon so far. We had 5 women only teams from different part of Kerala joined for coopathon. More than one third of the participants were girls.
Pehia is a non profit initiative lead by Enfa and Sreepriya, Mufeeda for bridging the gender gap in technology. Exams are going on for all the colleges, Pehia hackathon team lead by Ann Mary made sure that the girls don’t having exam are present at coopathon venue at early morning.
Working with the international organisations
The key leanings of this coopathon was working with multi stakeholders. We had many world leading organisations as the partner of coopathon like International labour organisation ( ILO ), Uralungal Labour Contract Co-operative Society Ltd ( ULCCS ) International Co-operative Alliance Asia and Pacific ( ICA -AP Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode ( IIMK). The measure of success & outcomes are different from organisation to organisation, Thanks to Mohit from ICA-AP for helping me understand much about the perspective of the stakeholders.
The hackathon model was new to most of the stakeholders other than KSUM and Cooperative model are entirely new to us. Making sure that everyone are in the same page was the hardest of all. The best part was everyone are excited about learning the other perspective and to see how this evolves.
The key outcome of the coopathon activity was we get more youth to learn, discuss and involve in the cooperatives movements. In the other hand, delegates from more than 20 countries came for the conference got a flavor of how technology and young perspective can shape the future of cooperatives.
When you hear a lot good things
TM Thomas Issac | Minister, Finance and Coir — Government of Kerala
Thomas Issac was one of the known names when it comes to alternative development and business models. He came, spend time with all the team at midnight of day one. He came back the next day and spend an hour with us discussing about the Kids learning technology TESD project supported by TinkerHub. Read his post about his coopathon experience here .
This is my post about his visit and discussions we had about Kids learning technology.
Articles by attendees | Vishnu KO
Vishnu KO, A second year student from Rajiv Gandhi Institute of technology written beautifully about their experience at Coopathon. People start thinking, discussing about business where value, happiness comes in thefront raw.
A Journey of a Thousand miles Begins with a Single Step !
https://medium.com/@vishnuko/a-journey-of-a-thousand-miles-begins-with-a-single-step-5c8313df3d0b
Being the host | The fun parts
1. The Dashboard
Fasil creating this awesome dashboard for the preliminary selection flow just like that in 10 min.
2. The “Woww someone enjoys his job like ice cream” comment
We had mentors coming to guide the teams. We were interacting with the mentors and some participants were around, a mentor starts asking me question like hows the work and stuff. I was kind of high with the kind of calmness i’m seeing inside myself these days, I told him like I choose to be here in this organisation as they believe in what I believe. We have freedom and flexibility to achieve the vision goals and not much operational stuff are scrutinized other than the quality of the outcomes. I was smiling during all these conversations about the work I do, maybe because of that his comment came as “Woww someone enjoys his job like ice cream”.
3. Joy of Creating something together
We- Me, Fasil, Jithin and Denny spend weeks together for making this happen. We had a long list of wonderful moments and pure jocks came as part of the journey. We had a lot of awesome peoples from KSUM like Tom, Michael, Akhil, Sakir, Praveen and a lot of amazing people from ULTS like Abhinath, Shiju, Ann, Jaina and many others to make this wonderful thing called coopathon happen. Thanks a lot team, you guys are awesome 😃
4. A night ride in rain with Mohit
Mohit wanted me to stay back to take him to town. When we left for town, it was raining heavily. He forgot his phone in a bus shelter we were sitting. We went back and collected it, once he had it back he was soo happy. On the way back he was singing all those beautiful Hindi gazals. The night, the rain and the songs it was superB
End of the day we all are lovely human beings trying to make a difference together ❤
This all started from the mail invitation to Sri-Lanka for the coopathon discussion during Feb 2017. These awesome guys at ICA already made me like a family. Santosh always make that face and call me Megaarrr :p
When they finally leaves from Kozhikode the gazal came to my mind in mohits voice “abhi na jao chhod kar ye dil abhi bhara nahi”
