[Grants] Grant request: Securing HealthHack's Digital Future

Thu Jul 5 05:04:41 AEST 2018

On Mon, Jul 2, 2018 at 3:58 PM, Jonathan Woithe <jwoithe at just42.net> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 05:51:28PM +1000, HealthHack Australia wrote:
> > Securing HealthHack's Digital Future
>
> I must admit that I hadn't heard of HealthHack until now.  It sounds like
> an
> interesting and worthwhile project.
>
>
Thanks!

> > HealthHack is free to attend and we welcome everyone to participate,
> > especially those who genuinely want to use technology to help improve
> > health and medical research outcomes. We???re strictly not-for-profit,
> > volunteer-run and 100% open source. All solutions are shared openly and
> > freely (as in speech AND beer). We ensure all code is released under an
> OSI
> > approved licence after each hack. More information about who we are and
> > what we do is available at healthhack.com.au.
>
> The projects are certainly diverse.  The "health hack stories" include a
> number of "what has happened since the event" sections which predictably
> reflect the often embrionic nature of the development immediately after the
> events.  Can you provide any guide as to how many of the HealthHack
> developments over the five years of your existence have gone into
> production
> use or have been the catalyst for others which have?
>

Producing things that last well beyond an event is a major challenge for
all Hackathons, including ours. We’ve tried to address this issue by
structuring our event around “problem owners”; people from the health and
medical research space who have a problem that needs solving, or an idea
that needs a prototype. We work with the problem owners in the lead up to
the event to help them refine their idea, and if their pitch attracts
enough hackers they’ll sit with them over the weekend and help with the
build. There are no prizes for winning at HealthHack anymore (well, we do
give out medals) and we’re not about catalyzing start-ups or driving people
towards getting seed funding. All we want to do is solve problems that
actual researchers are facing, by building bridges between the IT and
medical / health spaces. Our problem owners attend because there’s a very
specific issue they need help with and, when the prototype is built,
there’s an automatic incentive for them to use and maintain the code after
the event. Probably our best examples are the additions to the
Stemformatics ecosystem YuGene
https://www.stemformatics.org/expressions/yugene and Multiview
https://www.stemformatics.org/expressions/multi_view which were both
initially developed at HealthHack events in Brisbane. Another similar
project is MDBox http://www.mdbox.org/ which went on to receive a CBR
Innovation Development grant worth $100 000 for prototype development and
is still a work in progress.

It’s worth noting though that not everything that gets built at a
HealthHack event is an tool that’s expected to have wide use. For example,
on one occasion we helped a researcher build a system to help them move
ridiculous amounts of research data between collaborators. We’ve built
prototypes whose primary use after the event is to generate results needed
for grant applications to fund further work in related areas. While we do
all we can to encourage the creation of code that will be used regularly in
the future, we’re happy to work on anything that helps drive research,
promotes open source code and strengthens the community.

>
> > We would also like to become an official sub-committee of LA which would
> > give us the level of control over our bookkeeping we require.
>
> It probably goes without saying, but this is a separate issue to that of
> grant funding.  That is, either or both could happen independently AFAIK,
> with the merits of each being evaluated separately.
>

Of course, we understand. It’s probably not the greatest move to mix the
two subjects in one email but they’re linked in a (weak) fashion from our
perspective due our need of an accounting platform.

>
> > HealthHack has been around in various forms since 2013 and we have a
> fairly
> > large and diverse alumni scattered around Australia, however there are
> four
> > of us who have been involved with HealthHack for several years and
> oversee
> > the long-lived aspects of the group as a whole.
>
> It seems from the application that there has been a fairly significant
> rotation of personnel over the years, with a relatively small core of
> people
> providing continuity.  Is this an accurate picture, or have I misread the
> situation?  Does the majority of work within HealthHack fall to the core
> team, or do you receive significant assistance from others directly
> involved
> in the specific events around the country?
>

HealthHack began in Melbourne in 2013 with a small core of organisers and
spread to other states as these people or others associated with the event
moved around. In 2016, one of the winners from the 2015 hack in Brisbane
ran an event in Canberra bringing the total to 5 cities. Each event is run
by a small core of local organisers who’ll then recruit other volunteers
from the community. Anyone who does a good job gets rewarded with more
work! Most of our core organisers are past participants who’ve stayed on to
help. Whether an event is held in any particular city depends on the
availability of the core organisers, so not every city runs an event every
year. The Brisbane team is currently the most active and will be the only
city hosting an event this year. There are 5-6 core organisers in Brisbane
who’ve been involved with the event either as organisers, mentors or
participants since 2015 and another group of 7-10 volunteers who are
helping with other aspects of the organisation of this years event. Things
are similarly structured in Melbourne and Sydney, though we no longer have
a core group of organisers in Canberra or Perth.

>
> Is it fair to conclude that the motivation behind the grant request is to
> fund infrastructure which is better suited to your organisational
> requirements compared to what you have been using in the past?  How would
> the awarding of the grant to fund the suggested services improve the
> ability
> of HealthHack to deliver their future events?
>

Almost. Some of the items we’re requesting money for are already up and
running, but being funded out-of-pocket by our more dedicated volunteers.
Some are services that we’ve been using the “free” version of, but need the
extra features of a paid service, and the remainder are things we would
like to have. As an organisation we’re distributed across many cities so we
rely heavily on online digital tools to function. HealthHack was founded by
a group of IT consultants but many of our current volunteers are from
non-technical backgrounds so we’ve iterated through several digital
incarnations over the years. This includes attempts to host our own
services but unfortunately, these systems invariably failed when the
volunteers who’d built or been caring for them needed to move on from the
project. Over time we’ve found that the best strategy is to use online
services that don’t require us to have volunteers with specific technical
skills and don’t require constant updates and maintenance. This year we
have an extremely active team in Brisbane and we’re pushing to consolidate
our digital platform so that next year there will be much better support
for the HealthHack organising teams in other cities. And then we can do
more of what we love doing (running the event), rather than spending time
sticky taping free online tools together or trying to revive malfunctioning
servers.

>
> Regards
>   jonathan
>

Thanks for your questions Jonathan!

Regards,
the HealthHack team.
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