Thomas reached out to me in the spring of 2018 after he saw how one Open Geneva hackathon used Sparkboard, and asked me if it would be possible to deploy it to a whole festival of 20-40 hackathons with several hundred participants. I was intrigued, first because we had never managed such a large number of simultaneous events, and second - most important - I saw that we had a strong alignment of values. 

The Open Geneva approach is centred on what I like best about hackathons: fun, unpretentious, intense creative work - a messy process where results cannot be stated in advance, because they depend totally on who walks into the room and what happens when they mix. The focus is not on corporate promotion or raising "buzz" but rather: an actual process of learning and experimenting together. 

I see Sparkboard as a utility, which should mostly sit in the background while participants and organizers actually make things happen. It is software which makes certain social processes concrete and legible so that participants can make sense of the space they are in, and then organize themselves into small teams which work toward self-determined goals. The software can't function without a dynamic human community living on top, and Open Geneva is a kind of laboratory which studies how to grow these communities and help them thrive.

One of the important problems of our time is how we (humans) can retake control of the "social infrastructure" that has come to dominate our interactions (see: Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram...). The hackathon projects of yesteryear have crystallised into apps, which sit in shiny app stores as if shrink wrapped. They do not "dialogue" but rather "dictate": here is what you can do and how you must do it. 

Sparkboard itself is not immune to these outcomes, in its legacy state. But this is where I see a special opportunity for Open Geneva and Sparkboard to collaborate: to turn our processes inward, and iterate toward a system that is malleable, and asks to be shaped and reshaped by every person and community who touches it. A piece of software which can "run our communities'' without predetermining how. 

This is what I am most excited about in our ongoing partnership. Together, I think we can attempt a truly "hackable" social utility which can evolve alongside its users. Not only by making its source code open, but by designing its code to be read and rewritten on the fly by all of us.