#alternative weekend

I wonder how a team of random people can work so well and deliver so much in the first two days they meet — especially after seeing how many consolidated teams can do nothing for months.

Maybe it was the passion for the cause. You go to Good for Nothing* because you want to help someone with their cause, because you believe in their idea and share their vision. 

Maybe it’s because of the community sense that you get, after only 10 minutes there, sitting down on the floor talking as a group about what has to be done. No formalities. Just do what you are able to do to help. Share your ideas.

Maybe it’s because there wasn’t a predominance of males. Actually it was the opposite. If you work in IT as I do, you know what is like: men every day, everywhere. Women have a different touch on the way of getting things done, also have a different vision and let’s be honest: a feminine smile will make you work faster!

Maybe it was for the format of the event: no hierarchies or managers, just a flat “organisation” where everybody can stand up and have his say. Like the ancient Athens was. Everybody self-managed. As in 37signals.

Or maybe it was luck. More than 60 people came by their will and they chose in which of the three groups they wanted to go, after the initial pitch by the founders of the three causes. Our group, the foodcyclers**, had developers, digital artists, designers, marketers, strategists and writers. Working in synergy.

I just know that I never coded like that. It felt like a startup: everybody getting the shit done, no matter what and doing great work. I was amazed at the quality of every single person in what they did and you could see they really loved what they did. Everyone with her passion.

In a way, there were some elements reminding me of lean: the organisers initially talked about delivering and the deadlines by which we had to show what we had done. Half of the team the first day went to the Cambridge FoodCycle hub to get an idea of the “product” and the “customers”, coming back with content that then went into strategy and marketing. 5 Whys and Customer Development anyone?

I have a passion of coding: Rails programmer, I evangelize Ruby every time I can. Unfortunately FoodCycle’s website was using another language, PHP. No frameworks, no database. I allowed me an hour to try to at least import it into a framework using SQLite for the database, the time constraints were tight.

No luck: CakePHP was the more Rails-like, but the support to SQLite was crap. Yii and Symfony were so ugly I couldn’t look at them. Kohana and CodeIgniter were nice but the time was up. So I coded the administration backend and the new main page in plain PHP. For non-techies: it's like to build your bike from zero instead of inflating the tyres, before starting the race. I didn't have time to find another bike that I could use***.

Meanwhile, other people were producing great stuff on other aspects of spreading the message of FoodCycle: the new tagline, the strategy for developing and growing the reality, a stop frame animation and a story video. In two days!!!

Contributing was so great. The satisfaction of getting shit done for good is awesome. The guys from FoodCycle were so happy. And, as a hardcore learner, I was thrilled by the skills of people present in the room, so much things I didn’t ever think about, that now I have to research.

But the best part, was the human side of the event: imagine meeting dozens of people, practically living in an open space together for two days, eating, talking, joking, with music in the background. Doesn’t it remind you of a high school trip?

To summarise, I think the guys from Good for Nothing had a great idea: donating expertise. What do you usually do if you want to help a cause? You donate money. But money is only a raw resource. It’s like handing a box of Spaghetti to a homeless. Yes, it’s food, but you have to cook it.

When you donate your expertise, it’s different: you give the final product they need and that is usually hard to find, even with money. Anyone paid a developer or a designer and didn’t get what requested or got it after ages? Ten-fold value is added by people working in teams, with founders next to them.

So next time you donate, try thinking if you could use that brain and hands of yours instead, to change the world by yourself, maybe even only for a weekend.

If you got thrilled by this story, come to the next event. If you didn’t, come as well, as you may understand once you are there. There is only one word for it: awesomeness.

A big thank you to every person that was there****.

  * Good for Nothing is a community project that fosters creative collaboration to do some good for nothing.

** FoodCycle combines volunteers, surplus food and a free kitchen space to create nutritious meals and positive social change in the community. It's a place where people that suffer denutrition or are usually alone go to find good food and share a laugh together. Its reality is all about slow food and creating connections between people.

*** The new pages will be live on the website in about two weeks.