colabi
colabi on Hacker News
gwf. if you, and salesforce, really believe it was an improbable series of poor decisions and not malicious intent, tell your bosses it is time to build the redemption story. and we can speak about how to reboot this together, the company and the contestants.
actually, you could do us all a favor. ask salesforce to open up the entry gallery. we've been trying to construct that ourselves. but some people are scattered to the wind. and others have relationships with salesforce and don't want them jeopardized by being an active voice.
people did hard work. and i'm not just advocating for myself. it is appauling that the work went into the circular file. and what they would have been judged on is the marketing brochure.
And btw, the system won't operate now if anyone actually tries to test it. Too many dependent systems doing things that I spun down.
Tell Salesforce to hold an open judging and I'll spin them back up. And EVERYONE should get a chance to show off their applications.
unfortunately, that was the cut of the video that i made prior to seeing the entry form. the actual video that was submitted to the office guideline is here:
https://vimeo.com/79931458
the only views were me. i included the other video after i spoke with a salesforce person about the issue. and they had directed me how to enter the links. that full one is the one that's getting hits because i like it more. it was obviously labeled as not the official video with directions to the official video in case it was accidentally seen.
here's the big problem though. this contest was supposed to validate real applications. healthcare.love is nice, but it's a hollywood set. it doesn't wire into that much. it makes the erroneous mistake of targeting the new healthcare marketplace with an application for expensive iphones? in a demo state that is already covered by covered california? not the government exchange that it's adorable name harkens? i actually wrote simulated systems to pull member plans off the db and fake authorize them and submit them back into the system so that notifications could travel back to the app. oh, and instead of text i included twilio for VOIP and data coordination between the client, not assuming the target individuals would be text savvy youngsters. oh, that, and having to pull of the 85,000 healthcare plans that actually come from the healthcare.gov open marketplace. not just a single json list. so in the end, yah, i guess maybe i should have just focused on the icons? didn't think that was the point.
i held back until now, but looks like the makers of that app are also employees of a salesforce invested company. so they are DQ'd. this is all the kind of thing an open judging with actual use or connection with the entrants could have simply identified. but it all happens in the dark.
so here's the thing. when you lure people into such a large development period with this statement:
But it’s not going to be easy—$1 million is going to bring out the best of the best. So don’t wait until Dreamforce, you’re going to want to get started now.
and you only have 150 entries, you owe everyone a run. video review becomes inexcusable. people flew in with weeks of work and teams of people. and you reviewed their video? was this supposed reward video craftsmanship? the last thing on many people's minds when you intentionally led them to believe it was the work that counted?
2 of the five finalists now require disqualification. people are looking into the other 3. how thorough could that process really have been?
There are a lot of things wrong with that, not the least of which being that you can't modify rules in obscure places. That changed participation. Why not modify and notify the official rules. If they stuck in an obscure forum post an hour before deadline that the winner had to sell their code to salesforce for a dollar, would that still be a legal modification? That aside, they knowingly or unknowingly did not pass the modification rule to the judges.
It got worse. healthcare.love was in the salesforce pocket too. Patrick Hoge reported. He's doing a great job and is going to run down finding all entrants. also, it's worth looking into 3rd 4th and 5th now.
NEW BREAKING NEWS> THIS THING WAS FULLY RIGGED. HEALTHCARE.LOVE CAME FROM SALESFORCE PORTFOLIO COMPANY.
Violates:
Neither you nor any of your team members are an employee of
salesforce.com or its related companies as of September 1, 2013 or during the
Hackathon; nor an immediate family member (parent, sibling, spouse, child) of
or household member to an employee.
Do you know which finalist the check in deadline was extended for ?
unfortunately, they are also in a bind by stating that only the new work would be judged. @aliciatweet cites that it looks like they webview'd their existing site (would have to be verified). so, that means they judged using a webview as a million dollar contribution? my guess is that the call happened in which partners were allowed in with existing tech. and that information was never passed to the judging team with specific reference as to work accomplished within the hack period. possibly an innocent mistake or specifically designed to pass people through.
I'm establishing a fact timeline in a google doc. There is a first hand account of a call between salesforce and partners that allowed them to bring premade apps with the instructions that only contributions during the hack would be considered. That info was not made public. It altered the rules materially. Moreover that info was probably not disclosed to judges or the initial team as it would have reduced the upshot app to a text field with Siri to translate. Can someone else confirm?
Wow. Thank you. Who issued the call from their side? I can't imagine they passed that information to the judges. But even before then it should have been made public and applied to the entries. That would have made the winning app a text field with Google voice that shows an arbitrary link
I'm starting a fact timeline that we can contribute to. Google spreadsheet probably. maybe it's all the episodes of ms marple my wife watches. Can you say how and when you came across this info? Was it firsthand?
They're stuck in a hard place and an internal investigation is probably happening. This story will get worse before it gets better. I have a feeling that the story that they gave their partners a pass on the rules has credibility. Which means if they retract the 1st place, they get sued by them. and they get sued for essentially fixing the competition. The easiest out they didn't take. And it begs the question as to why
are you kidding? There could be no better roi. I don't even think a prize would be necessary. People are angry for many reasons, not the least of which is that no one got to see what they created. That just reduces everyone to a seat filler for the promo videos
no. I know it wasn't sponsored by them. Not enough alert banners on the screen
Their strategy at this point if the high ups are stubborn will be to wait out the weekend for activity to die off. People get on with their lives. The thing to do now is to reach out to companies who could sponsor ending this thing right. prize or no prize. i think we organize to find a Microsoft or oracle who could host an evening
I spoke to many devs. As we are not former salesforce people, we are smart enough to know to subtract the single view or views we made when we watched it. We're also smart enough to put analytical into the apps and be able to read server logs. And that is how we know what happened during review
that guy doesn't get what people are feeling. People are feeling that this was a closed box. A possibly even pre determined outcome. And out of their efforts they didn't even get to show or talk about what they did - the least you can expect . So we have to shop for a new sponsor to finish it out. I think most people wouldn't even care so much about the prizes. have oracle or Microsoft end the even right with everyone's submissions. Let everyone show what they created
I had a simpler idea. What if Microsoft or oracle just took over to finish this thug. Most developers just want to show off what they did. Sales force never even created a gallery for that
i would excuse it if they didn't make such a big deal that you had to show source and that you should start a month early. when you do that, you OWE people a run. the way they did it, you didn't even get a little screen time to shine for your sweat. this thing needs to get rejudged in the open.
i wish it was a days work. they opened the competition oct 25th. so people were developing since then. and they might not have even gotten run.
it's fine to not win. i've won and and i've lost. i just won at Facebook last week. but i expect that what they ask to review, they review. i can't find anyone who said they detected any launches during the review period. i would have expected to find ONE person. don't run a hackathon with strict rules and a long development period and ask for source if you actually are NOT going to run the app. just be honest and ask for a wireframe or a f*ing powerpoint.
the prize structure was simply so that one company could eventually say "1 million dollar hackathon". no other reason. it's more reasonable to even it. every other company does that in the tech hackathons.
i killed myself to get my entry in. it was another version of healthcare.love. i wish i knew what they were doing so we could team up. i checked my analytics this morning. i was the only one who viewed the official video. i was the only one who launched the app. i'd love to collect the stats from everyone to see how many apps even got played.