Rob Pickering (founder and CEO) and the IPCortex team have been at several TADHacks. They participated at the first TADHack in Madrid in the 2014, and won the Google prize for our RTCEmergency incident response hack. They’ve subsequently attended TADSummits and participated in last year’s TADHack-mini London event building Keevio eye, WebRTC on a drone, and took part in TADHack Global Lisbon with No More RCS.
This year IPCortex are doing something more collaborative and socially useful for TADHack-mini London.
Rob explained there are two major factors affecting the development of beneficial new communication applications:
- Communication is inherently social and some of the most obvious untapped benefits come from democratizing communication for social good. This has the potential to reduce costs, and increase the quality and capacity of communication in a way that is limited only by the imagination of individual social enterprise.
- The availability of well trained, skilled and motivated developers who understand the potential of real time communication is crucial to this process.
A few weeks ago, Rob met Dan Sofer who runs a social enterprise called Founders and Coders. They provide free Javascript development courses in East London via peer learning, mentoring and exposure to projects brought to them by other social enterprises and corporate clients. It’s an innovative response to the skills gap most of us in the industry are acutely aware of.
Rob did a quick pitch for them on some of the capabilities that can be introduced into applications using WebRTC. They were fascinated and Dan and Rob quickly hatched a plan to run a training workshop.
As they are running the workshop with Founders and Coders (FAC) in the first week of April, it makes the timing just right to bring the best of the social benefit ideas to participate in TADHack-mini London. Once the dust has settled, IPCortex is then planning to fund a FAC student team to take the most valuable application forward to a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) implementation for the chosen social enterprise.
This is all pretty ambitious, none of the FAC students participating will have been exposed to implementing real time communications before the workshop at the start of the week, and by the end of the week they will be developing and presenting the best of their own hacks based on real world use cases at TADHack. We have never done anything like this on this kind of timescale before but it is going to be great fun. Maybe we just might also generate something that has a lasting impact using communication for social good 🙂