This time last week I was creating software as part of a hackathon team at SocialDevCamp Chicago. Our team was called “Team Awesome”, Abraham (@abraham) was the project visionary and hardcore hacker who recognized a valuable service could be built to allow the creators of Twitter Lists to invite people to add themselves to the lists be tweeting a specific phrase, transforming their list in to an “Awesome List”. For those of you who may not be active users of Twitter or Twitter Lists, all you need to know is that this addition is “Awesome!”.

What was truly awesome to me was that we were able to build a valuable and non-trival application in just over 24 hours! We came in 2nd place out of 12 participating teams. This application is now live, and one week later we have 65 people signed up to be beta-testers. You can see our creation here: http://awesomeli.st/

Our team, led by Abraham, also included Jason @chigoodrich a skilled communicator who created an engaging presentation to communicate the awesomeness of our project to the audience at SocialDevCamp and Justin @justingroy a social media buzz machine who had the whole conference (and beyond) talking about Team Awesome. I helped in-part with constructing the Drupal site, that was the easy part. What was most challenging for me was to make sure the three of us understand the genius of Abraham’s idea from our own perspectives – this involved asking a lot of questions and white-boarding the vision – thank you Abraham for your patience! I felt ‘it click’ Saturday evening around 10pm, our collective motivation kicked in and we all dove into tasks which matched our skills and aligned to the one vision, that was – Awesome Lists!

This achievement was a manifestation of theoretical talk I gave on Saturday based around asking the question similar to the one we just half answered:

What will it take 
to co-create 
epic stuff while pursuing 
our individual passions?

The second half of the question, which I am still exploring is:

How can we earn a great living by doing this?

Contributing to the creation of Awesome Lists was the highlight of my weekend, but wait there is more! I connected to Abraham using a Weave created for the event:

Using this weave I discovered that Abraham and I have a complimentary skill set in Drupal and I was able to begin following him on Twitter and this is how I discovered about his visionary and valuable project. I am also fortunate to be working in a co-working office space (@OfficePort) with Jason and Justin. I recognized that their skills would be a huge addition to the team and that is how the four of us became “Team Awesome”.

I am grateful for the SocialDevCamp event, which for me was an arena for learning, experimenting and creating. I was able to test out the potential of using a Weave to connect with people who collectively were capable of creating more than we could alone. I am pleased to report that this experiment was a success! The Weave was one piece of the puzzle, it needed a space where face-to-face connections could occur, in addition to time for us to leverage these connections, this could not have happened without the amazing organizers of the event.

Thank you to the organizers of SocialDevCamp Chicago for creating this event where we could share our passions, connect our skills and unleashed our collective potential.

Thank you Tim Courtney (@timcourtney), Andy Angelos (@andyangelos) and all the others that made this event happen. And also Peter Morano (@petermorano) for organizing the hackathon.

My hope and intention is that further co-creation activites will happen because of the connections that were made through the Weave and during this event. I know I have some meetings next week with people I met and I would like to share a couple of tweets that give me hope other connections were made that will lead to awesome collaborations and co-creations.