Hi, this is Paul Zelizer and welcome to AwarePreneurs, the world's longest running social entrepreneur podcast. I'm your host. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps our guests help more social entrepreneurs, help more people and it costs you nothing. Thank you so much. Today your guest is me, Paul Zelizer, the host of the show and and I've been a longtime entrepreneur and ecosystem builder and co founder of NM TechTalks, NM Climate and several other impact organizations. Our topic today is inside New Mexico's first climate hackathon. And I have to say I'm tired and my heart is full. Very, very full.

I'm recording this on Monday and we had a wonderful weekend. Our first climate hackathon in New Mexico and it was amazing. It was really inspiring and the solutions that emerged were really impressed me and everybody there. What I wanted to do is give you a little bit of how a hackathon like this works, specifically a climate focused hackathon. I want to give you a few of the key takeaways that myself and some of the other leaders and mentors took away what we saw happening and and a few tips about how you might do something similar. So let's get into it. First of all, some hackathon basics. Basically a hackathon is rapid team based prototyping, building something together.

In our case we used a 30 hour format. In other words, participants came and things started at 9am on Saturday and by 3pm on Sunday it was like turn off your computers and the hackathat building section is over and we're off to the judges and doing the demo portion and judges judging. So they had 30 hours to kick off, find a team build test and then demo it in front of the judges. And we invited in community members. Our requirements were that it must be climate based and we were really focused on a working prototype. As a matter of fact there were four judges criteria and one of them was that two of them right they were it had to be climate relevant and number two, it had to be a functional live product that they could show. This wasn't a pitch competition with mockups. This was showing us a live product at the end of the 30 hours.

The other two were a potential for large impact to help a lot of people. And the fourth one was judges discretion based on their years in their experience and you know, certain judges really might have saw on a need for something even it was a little less polished. They knew or felt strongly this was really important. They could sort of put their thumb on the scale a little bit in the direction of something that they thought based on their experience was very important. Each team, after building for 30 hours, got three minutes to describe their product and then demo it in front of the judges and the community. And that was the nuts and bolts. So three key takeaways. What did we learn doing this? Number one, we learned that doing an impact focused hackathon, in our case this was climate that it attracts an incredibly dedicated and diverse group of hackers.

We had developers, designers, founders, students with a full range. Some people who were very, very early on in their tech career and in their tech journey, and some who had building things for decades. We also saw that people brought a real collaborative effort because the whole thing was mission driven. And the sense of the room is like even if somebody was on a different team and you could help them or, you know, the way, there was a lot less friction than a lot of other human interactions under pressure. It was a mission driven community and you could feel it. You kept hearing people talking about the energy in the room. There was a sense of mission and we're here to do something really important. The other thing is that our hackers were smart, enthusiastic, they built fast and they learned from their mistakes or things that weren't working.