@giorodriguez: Yes, hacking is about technology. But it’s more about attitude
Neo.com's Evan Henshaw-Plath chats with hackers
On a day when Puerto Ricans all over the world are tuning in to a parade (it’s getting harder and harder to avoid the coverage) — and on a week that the rest of the world is preoccupied with government encroachment on citizen data — it’s right that we take time to reflect on an event that took place in San Juan this Thursday, where government leaders, business leaders, and the technology community came together to illustrate the power of data when it is placed in the hands of citizens.
The event: The Puerto Rico Tech Summit, June 6, at the San Juan Convention Center, where more than 900 people gathered not to just talk but to act upon Puerto Rico’s future. For the highlight of the event — beyond an impressive panel of speakers – was an all-day hackathon, running concurrently with the “main” event, leveraging a big first for Puerto Rico: the open sharing of 10 different sets of data from Puerto Rican government and quasi-government (businesses that serve the Puerto Rican public) entities.
Giancarlo Gonzalez
The hackathon, potentially, is history-making. And it’s the brainchild of collaboration between private citizens (including Puerto Rican techie/entrepreneurs J. Ramphis Castro and Ricardo Burgos) and a government leader (Giancarlo Gonzalez, CIO and Advisor to the Government of Puerto Rico). The collaboration itself is a microcosm of the ecosystem on display at the event, the fusion of two worlds that need to come together in Puerto Rico, said Gonzalez. And together they did on Thursday. At the end of the day, 31 teams presented working concepts for applications using police data, geographical data, power outages, etc.
The design of the conference was meant to fix a persistent challenge for the government sector.
“When you limit a government conference to talk, you don’t see any execution,” said Gonzalez. “The hackathon is probably the most disruptive thing we did. What better way is there to show that government is executing than to throw back the challenges to our tech community and work with them.”
I was in Puerto Rico exactly one week before the Tech Summit at a conference for the Puerto Rican diaspora. The innovation there was an interactive format known as “open space” — another first for Puerto Rico — and one of the big themes was the emergence of “hacker culture” and its role in the reconstruction of the Puerto Rican economy, its infrastructure, and potentially its brand.
I like the concept of hacker culture for at least three reasons. First, as Gonzalez shared with me over the weekend, technology as an accelerator for processes represents a big shift. “The main goal is to speed up processes to serve citizens, businesses, and government-to-government interaction.” It’s about Puerto Rico evolving to become more viable in an increasingly competitive global economy, and opening up data to developers might help Puerto Rico get there faster. Gonzalez also defended the ROI on open data projects. A number of recent studies have shown that open data can deliver a significant rate of return on investment either through reduced costs in government services or incremental revenue.
Second, Puerto Rican hacker culture could have an aggregate effect of creating a new regional hub for Puerto Rico. That’s in fact the vision that Burgos and others have for Puerto Rico, a Silicon Valley for the Americas (my term, not his) that can make Puerto Rico not just viable, but a force in the region. Other Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile) are thinking this way, too. But there’s no reason to think that several hubs can’t emerge at once.
all together now
Finally, there’s an important point we need to make about the word “hacker.” Yes, for most people, the word connotes tech. But in a larger sense — e.g., when we say hacker culture — it’s more about attitude. It’s about getting things done, and quickly. It’s about engaging many people to work, on many different things. It’s about working iteratively, in small discrete pieces, understanding that you can’t fix the future all at once. And most of all it’s about believing, at a time when disbelief dominates most conversation.
“In the end, the opportunity is to get people to see the new business rules and see how the rules can get us beyond the 100 by 35,” said Gonzalez, referring to the dimensions of the island (100 by 35 miles) that Puerto Ricans often cite in discussions Puerto Rico’s role on the global stage. It’s a cultural challenge, Gonzalez admits. But there are ways — like hackathons — to show that the rules work.
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