Members of the 2021 team: Mikolaj Gogula (Software Engineer, GomSpace), Adrian Michalik (Software Engineer, GomSpace) and Jędrek Kaczmarek (Project Manager, GomSpace).
Can you tell us more about the solution you provided to the challenge cooked by Raiffeisein?
OpenStage is a video-streaming live conference platform that allows people to communicate using extra actions depending on the business domain.
We presented a Raiffeisen bank community platform based on the OpenStage engine:
The main idea is to give bank clients a place where they could gather and discuss things that are important to them (like e.g. finance advice, investment solutions) - amongst predefined channels.We introduced gamification processes and every client was able to collect internal currency by helping other people. In the end, you were able to redeem your balance for internal bank product discounts.
How did your team experience this 36-hour hackathon?
We had a lot of fun! Of course there were situations of full focus mode during which we stayed quiet and tried to progress on a project, but we also tried not to lose a good mood by e.g. watching funny videos together.
How did you organise work within your team to be able to deliver your project on time?
We live close to each other so we were able to spend most of Saturday together. When being separate we were able to communicate via OpenStage!
What were the main axes of the challenge you focused on?
From our own experience we understand how difficult it is to stay separate from other people for so long.That's why we wanted to give everybody an opportunity to socialise with people interested in similar topics. Sharing a passion with others gives spacefor passionate discussions and lets us learn new things. We also understood that such a place may be a perfect ground to support local projects and businesses. After a brainstorm we came out with an idea of an app that allows both things!
Your team participated in both this year’s challenges, what are your motivations when you're taking up these challenges?
When there are two great challenges to take it is very difficult to decide which one should we take - so we tried to figure out a solution that could solve both of them.It worked so we decided to share our achievements in both challenges.
What would be your advice for the 2022 teams?
Get some sleep. Sure thing it is important to deliver a working product but staying up all night really influences your capability to solve tasks.Sometimes it may mean not delivering some feature but trust us, in the morning, after having some sleep our minds were sharper and problems that we encountered in the night became solvable in minutes.Another thing that helped us was that we really had fun from this project.