What can a cognitive psychologist do in a hackathon?
By: Doris Chow
Tags: Cognitive Psychology, Career Development, Hackathons, Personal Growth, Community Engagement

I am a cognitive psychologist and participated in my first hackathon last weekend. The mission of the TogetherVsVirus hackathon is to generate solutions that solve challenges suggested by communities across Canada. For this hackathon, I worked with Stéphane, a marketing director, and an entrepreneur, to address the challenge of mental health and social isolation imposed by COVID-19. As a result, we developed a website containing resources about the benefits of community gardening.

Why did it matter?

Did you know that community gardens are considered non-essential in many places in Canada, except for British Columbia, New Brunswick, and some cities in Quebec? In areas where community gardens are non-essential, people lose access to their beloved gardens under the challenges of COVID-19. Community gardening helps these people — many of them are older adults and people of low-income — to have access to food, relieve stress, connect, and build communities.

What did we want to advocate?

~3000 gardeners and others have signed a petition to ask that community gardens should be considered an essential service, highlighting that community gardening is a critical part of their lives during these challenging times. There are ways to open community gardens adhering to public health and safety. Our website provides information about how community gardening serves broader psychological, physical, and societal benefits. Our goal is to empower community garden users and organizers with information that can help them make their case with their local government to make community gardens essential.

What did I learn from this experience?

I learned that my research and communication skills have a lot to offer in solving real-world challenges. I saw Stéphane’s message on the team-building channel. He explained his mission as an organizer of a community garden in Montreal, and I pitched some ideas of how I might be able to contribute using my skills as a scientist. Voila — a team is formed. Thanks to my academic training, I was able to quickly assess the situation, propose a solution, skim scholarly research, and create content for our deliverable/pitch. This process felt like a breeze as I am used to high-level thinking and analytical thinking. I believe that there are many forms for scientists or scholars to engage in public matters with their skills beyond their subject expertise. This hackathon experience strengthens this belief.

As cliché as it sounds, I also learned that teamwork is critical. While I focused on generating content based on my research, Stéphane, whose day job is a Marketing Director, built a full website from scratch. I saw in real-time how he edited the pitch presentation slides and what he considered to hit the content points. What Stéphane achieved in that timeframe is incredible. I would not have done any better. He seemed to think likewise about what I have put on the table. This experience mirrors (at least what I believe) real-world collaboration works: collaboration should be fast and efficient where everyone’s contribution is recognized, and everyone gets to grow from it.

This hackathon also broadened my view on collaboration. I used to think that cooperation requires face-to-face communication, be it virtual or physical. With Stephane, we worked together over instant messenger (Slack) and online collaborative tools (Google Doc and Google Slides) without having seen each other’s faces or heard each other’s voices once for the most part. It’s only in the last hour we finally ‘met’ each other when we videoconference via Zoom to record our pitch. Working toward a common goal does not require us to be best friends with each other when we trust each other when we have a common interest. I find this collaborative experience incredibly authentic.

What would I have done differently?

Having juggled multiple projects and working with different people, I have come to quickly notice that we were missing some talents on our team. At least an additional team member could have helped with some of the following: conceptualizing the pitch, editing, designing info-graphic. Mainly because this project directly relates to policy-making, I would have loved to collaborate with people with experience interacting with policy-makers/politicians and people with experience writing briefing notes. Translating our project into French would have allowed us to reach a broader audience. These are some ideas to improve this project to have a more significant impact if I were to lead this project with more than 48 hours to plan and execute.

I also reflected on how I found it challenging to find my team and continue to stay engaged with the hackathon. The initial team-building period of this hackathon was stressful and inefficient to me. There seemed to be too many people saying things on the team-building channel with too few people reading them. The problem of having too many people talking with few people listening and genuinely responding is that the noise is drowning out the signal (useful information and the call for help). I do not want to add to the noise. What I chose to do was to reply to two threads (one of them was Stéphane’s) only after carefully reading what they wanted to achieve and considering what I can offer based on their needs. Stéphane replied to me, and the other team ignored me. Only a 50% success rate of matching, so I can’t say if this works broadly, but it for sure worked for me this time. After finding my team, I rarely stayed on the main Slack channel because I wanted to concentrate on my work and extract relevant information. I wonder how my experience might change in a larger team, with a different focus (product/business case development vs. social issues), or with more interactions with other teams.

Take home

Participating in a hackathon and gardening are both new to me. New experiences often lead to failures, but also provide opportunities for reflection and growth. I thank Stéphane and the TogetherVsVirus hackathon organizers for creating this opportunity for me to grow. I reflected on not only my role as a scientist in solving real-world issues but also my intuition about human communication and collaboration in the process. I didn’t feel that hackathons were something for me, but this feeling has changed by this experience and reading more about hackathons. If you are like me, I encourage you to explore opportunities like this to apply your skills and knowledge, or just to get inspired on devpost.com (e.g., this). If you are curious about what Stéphane and I have done to challenge ourselves in this hackathon, please check out our submission and give us a ‘like’!