Wanted smart hackers for hackathon

MUMBAI, INDIA: Walter Heck, 31, a location independent entrepreneur from Holland and the man behind ComeHackWithUs (CHWU) — an upcoming hacking event on an remote island talks to CyberMedia News (CMN) on the idea and objective of CHWU, choice of applicants, their work and along with his company OlinData and love for open source and his project.

Here are excerpts from the interview:

CMN: How did you get this idea of organizing a hacking event and brief about your self?

Walterheck: I am a 31 year old, location independent entrepreneur from Holland and have been traveling and working from 5 different continents over the past five years. During which I had participated in a couchsurfing.org volunteer project in Alaska in 2008, where 25 people working on the couchsurfing website were in a house for three months. The experience was magical and life-altering, so I'm looking to create something similar to that through the hacking event.

CMN: Brief on the ComeHackWithUs — what is the objective of the event and is it being done for first time?

Walterheck: It is the first time I am organizing it, but I am sure others have organized similar events in the past. The objective is to give 12 people an extremely nurturing environment without any distractions so they can work on their project without being bothered. Two months should give them good time to finish a first version of their product.

CMN: So when will the two month's duration of the event starts and have you selected any venue for hosting the event?

Walterheck: ComeHackWithUs (CHWU) will start around end of 2012 or start of 2013 and the venue is yet to be decided. We have some properties, but nothing is set in stone yet.

CMN: Any particular reason, why you looking at remote island for this event?

Walterheck: Because I experienced that being in a location where you have no-one but each other the bonding is more strongly. If you do it in a city people will go out of the house for small reasons. Not to say they are not allowed to do so but I just want to encourage the group to work together.

CMN: For CHWU event you are looking for UI/UX based coders or programmers. So are you targeting the talent pool of a particular country or region for your event or its open to all?

Walterheck: Nope, as long as they are smart, motivated and fit the psychological profile they are more then welcome. It is open to all across the globe.

CMN: What are the criteria for the selection to be part of the 12 member team that will be part of the event?

Walterheck: We are determining that now. We will look for strong technical skills and will look carefully at the psychological profile. Even one bad apple can ruin the atmosphere in such a place

CMN: In simple terms, the interested coder or programmers will sent you applications, which will be scanned and selected ones will undertake some tests and interviews?

Walterheck: Yeah, but not just me. We will try to set up a transparent selection process. There will most likely be a Skype interview of sorts and also we are thinking about for instance asking for character witnesses.

CMN: Will the selected candidates get chance to work on your Tribily project?

Walterheck: Nope, they can choose to bring a project or work on a project that someone else brings. Tribily is just a project of my company OlinData, which does Server Monitoring as a Service. Most of Tribily's code is open source and it's fully based on open source projects like Drupal and Zabbix. In general I am a big fan of open source and transparency in general.

CMN: With this hacking event you are trying to bring out the best in those selected 12 people, which later will work on their own projects or some will get chance to work with your projects?

Walterheck: We will see. I'm not excluding the option of hiring one or more of them, but it's not the target. All I want is for these people to have a great environment to do what they do best in.

CMN: But what will these 12 people do post the two month event? Are you going to give them any major task or project on which they will be work during their stay at the event?

Walterheck: No, they will bring their own idea or work on the idea of someone who is also there. After the two months, I hope they have a good idea of whether it is worth continuing what they started at CHWU.

CMN: In terms of CHWU, how are you going to fund this event and managing the expense of those participants? Are you looking for sponsors or it is entirely driven by your own funds?

Walterheck: No, we will have the participants to pay a small fee (we're thinking 400USD) and the rest will come from sponsors.

CMN: So far how many applications have you received? Any trend you seeing in terms of the applications and geography or countries?

Walterheck: we haven't been able to map them to countries yet, but we have received over 500 emails from people who are interested in attending this event.