Dundee Service Jam
This past weekend was Dundee’s first Global Service Jam, a truly global event where near 3000 participants in 120 cities worldwide had only 48 hours to change the world – or at least give it their best shot!
The jams runs in tandem round the planet with teams in each city having 48 hours to design a service starting Friday at 6.30pm local time with the release of the secret theme. New Zealand kicked off the jamming first and slowly the rest of the world joined with the embargo on sharing the secret theme lifted some 20 hours later when the sun set in California.
Global connections are a key part of the Jam process and one of my roles as an organiser was to facilitate the global partnerships between Dundee and the world. In the image above left you see me walking round introducing jammers in Dundee to the Beirut Service Jam and on the right on screen in Beirut.
Each morning started local with a Scottish breakfast connecting with our Jam neighbours in Aberdeen and Glasgow before putting out the international feelers. We Skyped Mumbai, had a hangout with Auburn, listened into presentations in Luxemburg and Stockholm, chatted with Melbourne, live streamed to the world – we even showed NYC how the Harlem shake is done!
Farrah Berrou blogging from the Beirut Service Jam wrote “Highlight of the Event: Skype call with fellow Jammers in Dundee, Scotland”. For me this was also a highlight. When we Skyped into Beirut the jammers at both events bonded over such enthusiasm for their projects which was really amazing to see.
I feel immensely privileged to have been involved in the organisation of the Dundee event and I’m sure as a team we must have made running a jam look far too easy as already we are hearing from participants who want to get involved in next years Dundee Service Jam or even try a jam in their local area. This is exactly what the Jam is all about, collaborating, hard graft and trying new things. I look forward to working with or supporting any keen jammers in the future.
The Service Jam was just the beginning, I look forward to what is still to come!
Loved speaking with Beirut. The connections to the rest of the world were really effective and enabled great collaboration and knowledge exchange, both between our team of jam organisers and other jam organisers in Los Angeles, Beirut, Mumbai etc, but also between teams of jammers sharing ideas and cross-cultural insights.
Ross, having you managing the international relationships was crucial to this success. Carrying the laptop with webcam around was key to enabling jammers to really get to know participants at other jams via Skype. You managed the whole process of Skyping and Tweeting with other countries incredibly well.
I’d love to see how in future design-led events we can enable even greater collaboration with international friends; such as actually jamming via distance using Skype/Facetime etc. I think that would be interesting to think about developing that process further.
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