Many of us have attended conferences and enjoy the connections and conversations that come from attending them. For me, these conversations are the biggest take-away from a conference and I wanted them to be the focus of an event. That’s how the 1on1 concept was born.
Instead of an event filled with speakers who talk at you, we wanted to create an event where you could interact directly with an expert about their crafts, their stories, and their life’s good work. We also wanted to keep it local to build community and increase awareness about the talent and knowledge in our own backyards.
What do you love? What do you itch to know more about? 1on1 is an opportunity to talk with someone who’s passionate about things you’re also passionate about — whether it’s professional or personal. Each attendee will get 30 minutes of personal one-on-one time with their chosen expert as well as the opportunity to make new connections with attendees or rekindle connections from the past.
nGen Works is taking on the role of an incubator these days, which means we can connect with each other and launch projects and events like 1on1 while balancing time on client services. This allows us nGeneers time to kick ass and do great work for clients, but it also lets us spend time on the things we love while fostering growth in our local communities.
We’re very excited about this initial 1on1 Seattle channel, and want to bring it to other cities later in the year. So, if you’re not in Seattle, stay tuned for new events popping up around you.
Ladies and gents, I’d like to introduce you to Jen Hyde. Jen is a friendgeneer who started helping us a few months ago. She’ll be blogging regularly on Hapyn, beginning with this first post. When we started playing around with the idea of live blogging this project we wanted to make sure we had somebody dedicated and impartial reporting everything. Please welcome Jen and enjoy her coverage of the Hapyn project!
Three words came to mind as Carl pitched me on a new project called Hapyn™: vague, but exciting.
Tim Berners-Lee’s boss wrote these same words atop Lee’s 1989 proposal for the World Wide Web, right before the project was shelved for 18 months. Lucky for you, me, and the LOLcats, Lee and his colleagues rallied together to bring the idea – the web – to life.
I wanted to reframe the way we use information, the way we work together. – Tim Berners-Lee
As Carl talked about birds flying in unison, I thought about teams and ideas and pitches and packaging. Hapyn had an intriguing idea and a solid team behind it. So when Carl asked if I wanted in on the project, I of course said yes.
So here I am, describing Hapyn. Hapyn isn’t about features, or other apps that kinda sorta do similar things. It’s a story about improving the way we come together to accomplish things. It’s a story about facilitating collective action modeled after collective behavior. It’s a story that Carl, the self-described “deviant hippie trying to make work fun”, almost passed up.
That’s right, Hapyn almost didn’t happen.
nGen was set to turn down the project, but the client asked for a call before they did. So Carl got on the phone, and the client talked about birds. And fish. Swooping and swirling together. Turning in sync, right down to the millisecond. And Carl lost track of time, and then he changed his mind.
Thousands of birds take flight at Marseille Provence Airport in France
If you know Carl, you know why. He’s all about teams. How they work together. What drives them forward. How to build a jellyfish company without going Lord of the Flies. Carl’s spent an enormous amount of time thinking about these things. And so has the client.
So Carl said yes. Just like I did.
And really, how can you say no to the idea of bringing the beautiful complexity of the natural world to our everyday interactions? A million starlings can fly together, yet we struggle to get even small teams off the ground. Why?
Hapyn is the answer to that question. It’s a new operating system to improve how projects and occasions occur. It eliminates the waterfall process and replaces it with “stuff attached to things”. So interactions no longer have to happen in a set order. They can just hapyn. Spontaneously and immediately. Like birds taking flight.
The client described a “tracked object” as “the thing” you attach stuff to. At first Carl wrote the phrase “attach the stuff to the thing” followed by a question mark. By the end of the conversation, he added a bold exclamation point.
Catch up with us next month. We’ll talk more about nGen’s unique development approach, and the thinking behind the “tracked object”. Stay tuned…
Today I’m happy to invite you to follow along as we build a crazy cool app called Hapyn™. Explaining what Hapyn does is fun, because it sounds like fiction. Until you understand it, you think someone is making a joke by telling you that Hapyn can solve all of your business and personal organizational problems. Of course it can also help stop global warming and make sure your wedding goes off without a hitch.
The thing is, as our client envisions it, it can.
Hapyn is a platform for creating, managing and archiving events, or hapynings. It can help you run a charity event, family vacation, small business or create a new green space. Best of all, once you’re done you can share your event with others. Want to know more about the trip I took to Europe? Here you go. Have a complete understanding of everything I did, how I did it and what it cost.
Now for the fun. Every few weeks we’re going to blog about how it’s going. We’ll talk about the ups and the downs. Things we’ve learned. Mistakes we’ve made. And my promise to you is we’ll be completely honest.
So far we’ve made a couple of fun decisions that I think will raise some eyebrows.
The nGen team listens intently as they get the overview on Hapyn.
First, we’ll be working on the marketing and the product at the same time. This will be an interesting experiment as the two teams will be in frequent contact sharing ideas and brainstorming on ways to make the product and promotion tightly integrated.
Second, we’ll be using Hapyn to build Hapyn. No, we haven’t solved the mystery of time travel. But we have realized that we can add enough functionality to the prototype that it can function as our project management app. How cool is that? Using a product to build the product. Sci-fi stuff going on in here!
We’ve also been throwing around the phrase “minimum usable product” instead of “minimum viable product.” More on that soon…
Tell us what you’d like us to share as we build this new application!
