Nordisk Panorama Hackathon

Using materials in their playroom to plan the project

Fresh off the plane from Rome, I went to the Nordisk Panorama in Malmo, Southern Sweden. It started with the Nordic Transmedia meetup – an unconference of different sessions, held at a club/music venue called Inkonst. Friday was the opening night of the Fest, and also the start of the two day Hackathon expertly organised by Cecilie Stranger-Thorsen who’s a transmedia consultant with her company Stranger, well worth checking out.

A different model to last year’s it divided us into seven teams of four to hack two different projects, both coincidentally Finnish. My team was with Per – who has his own blog here –  Andreas and Johanna. We hacked/transformed the Avatar project from Oliver and Terevo – the photo on their site doesn’t really do them justice – and tried to come up with something social media/collaborative art around social issues. The original project – which you can read here – was meant for Finnish public TV station YLE, but after two years of development they passed. And apparently didn’t pay a penny for it. (Which just sounds plain wrong).

Anyway, it was a good experience, I met lots of very different people from the media/arts field across Scandinavia, and there was a bit of collaboration between teams (though not that much). There were cosy dinners on Saturday and Sunday. When it went well I felt very creative…but I still don’t really understand coding.

Main thing I learnt was no matter what the idea – test it! That meant trying it out on whoever was nearby. Their input was always useful. I’m pretty used to only thinking about the user/audience once the project is quite far advanced. Here, you’re forced to think about the user from the beginning. And the projects are more focussed and better for it.

 

 

By Krishan Arora

I'm an experienced television executive and producer. I started out at the BBC in London, working as assistant producer and director on a variety of documentary and magazine programmes. I then went to France to be one of the first programmers at Arte in Strasbourg when the channel launched in 1992. Returning to London after three years in France, I became Producer and Head of Development for documentary company Antelope. There I produced docs for all British broadcasters, with many co-productions on international subjects including the award-winning feature documentary Srebrenica - A Cry from the Grave, produced for BBC, NPS, PBS, and WDR. After a year developing and producing through my own company Electrify, I rejoined the BBC in 2001 as Commissioning Executive in Factual, commissioning Science, History and Arts documentaries and series from independent producers for all four BBC channels. In 2005 I became the BBC’s Independents Executive, responsible for the BBC’s strategic relationship with the UK independent television production sector across all genres – factual, drama, comedy and entertainment. In mid-2011, I went back to the world of production and consulting, for clients including NHK, Steps International, the Sunny Side markets, French production company Gedeon, and now the Australian broadcaster SBS. Of Indian and German parentage, I'm based between Copenhagen and my native London.