I am currently consulting at MYOB and I got a chance to be part of the MYOB Hackathon. It is a two day event where-in the entire company comes together to hack something as a team. The structure is as follows:
Wednesday Afternoon
Pitch day. This is where the employees pitch their ideas to everyone and recruit a team who is interested to work in that domain
Thursday
Hackday kick off. Work on the idea as a team
Friday afternoon
Final presentation and awards ceremony
The following summarizes what we did as a team in two days:
Pitch Statement
In the past I have looked at owing Tesla especially because electric cars are better for the environment. But behind the scenes, have you heard of stories like Cobalt which is used in electric cars is mined by children in Congo.
Apart from relying on regulations, I believe that you and I, as a consumer of these end products can take a stand against child labour if we knew where exactly these products came from.
I want to explore technology like blockchain to help us create an immutable audit trail and expose it to the end users to increase visibility into these underlying issues.
So if you are interested in working with blockchain and issues like child labor is close to your heart, welcome on-board :)
Our Product Name and Team members
Problem Statement
User Interviews
We interviewed 5 people from MYOB who have recently bought a car or a smartphone
We also interviewed the sales staff at a Tesla showroom to gain more insights about where the parts come from, what does the supply chain of Tesla look like
Insights
Solution Statement
There are two parts of the solution.
One offering would be to suppliers and manufacturers to record their transactions via the service we provide
The other one is for consumers to view the details about the supply chain. Since we had a day and half to build a POC, we decided to dedicate our time to build the consumer side of this business
Storyboard for consumer experience
What did we build
Users can scan a QR code which will redirect them to our site which would display an aggregated information about the supply chain and if child labor was involved anywhere along the line
The backend to feed this data was an out of box solution by AWS Cloud 9 to interact with Amazon Managed Blockchain service.
What we didn't build
A fully functional and transaction blockchain service to record the transactions
Takeaways
Takeaway 2
Child labour is a major human rights issue and we would like to call on everyone reading this to collectively think about solving this problem. Because if you and I are not thinking about this, no one is!
Final Presentation Slide Deck
Awards Ceremony
We won the overall Innovation award called the "Power Up" award. Woohoo :)
Thanks to MYOB and Telstra Purple for an awesome opportunity to be part of the MYOB Hackathon. It was an amazing experience!
