Last weekend I went to the NHS HackDay 'hackathon' in Manchester http://nhshackday.com/previous/events/2017/05/manchester/ In the end I couldn't stay for the 2nd day, so I can only comment on the one (Saturday).
The event was held in the Co-op 'Federation' building, on the top floor which looks to be like an incubator for internal 'agile' ideas, to get improvements off the ground and try new things out. Very much open-plan, plenty of space for people to break off into small groups and collaborate. Although I've been to hackathon events before, this was my first NHS Hackday, so I didn't really know what to expect apart from the general outlined schedule.
After the initial sign-in period, and introduction, people pitches their ideas to the group to get interest and help get potential projects off the ground. Then people were encouraged to find a project you're interested in, and get going. I picked the "NHS public data" project to join because that sounded very interesting to me, and something I could sink my teeth into. The pitch was to get openly available NHS stats data from CSV files into a more accessible format. There was quite an interest in this, with more than a dozen people interested from technical and non-technical backgrounds. So we split into 2 sub-groups, technical and non-technical to try to achieve something.
Of course I was part of the technical sub-group, and we started talking about the problem, and what we could potentially achieve over the weekend. These discussions the rest of the morning really, and from speaking with people from other teams they had a 'similar' problem with communication - conversations get dominated by one or two people. And I don't mean it's from the one person who pitched the idea, it's from others, who realize it or not, are simply constantly talking, and not letting others give their opinion. Then if your opinion is given, it's generally disregarded and considered as if you were interrupting. I think this is a big problem, and steps need to be taken to ensure everyone is included in a project. It should be the responsibility of everyone to ensure everyone else has an opportunity to give their thoughts and input. I realized this was happening, with many people just not speaking at all, so I would actively try to get people to speak up so everyone around would be included equally.
I also think another problem with communication is that since the event was NHS-related, clinicians can be whelming in their conversation, and are very poor in letting other speaks and seeking the opinion of others. For them, it seems whoever keeps talking or talks the loudest is the most important, and nobody else matters. This might fly in a hospital or clinical practice, is a very bad attitude to have, especially with new people who are volunteering, trying to understand, discuss, and work together for the 1st time in a new environment.
I'm going off-topic hear a little, but I feel strongly about correcting poor team communication. A team cannot perform well or produce good results who are unable to properly communicate effectively.
Regardless, for the project I get involved with, we managed to break down the technical tasks needed doing, and I encourages people to pick the area they want to work on so we might be able to show something by the end of it.
I picked the part of loading the data into a database, for which we chose MongoDB because it seemed to fit our needs (loose data schemas). Plus, we could get a freely hosted database through Mongo, one of the sponsors of the event. A normal SQL database would be fine, I'm sure, but since we essentially had a Mongo DBA on-call giving us cloud infrastructure for free, then why not? Otherwise I'd need to pay for my own hosting, for have a limited allowance, total number of queries, limited performance, etc.
I worked on loading some data into Mongo for the rest of the day, and I got somewhere, at least with local developmental testing. Our MongoDB was ready right at the end of the day, but regrettably I couldn't attend the 2nd day. I aim to work on this as a side-project in the coming weeks to properly explain this project, and see where I can get with it.
There was plenty of tea/coffee on-demand, but I forgot to bring power extender cables with me, so I know now for next time, if there is a next time, I should bring such niceties to make it even better. Well, I could even bring my own desktop and monitor with me next time if I want! Could be overkill, but there's nothing stopping me in all honesty.
All in all I had a lot of fun talking to new people, hearing about ideas about "how to make NHS IT less bad", and starting work on a side-project. For me, this is all very exciting and I really want to make progress into getting open NHS data more accessible. CSV or XLS files really aren't good enough, and maybe in the near future I'll be able to show something off.
I also have a couple ideas of my own that I might want to work on next as side-projects, or pitch them at future hack days.
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