Would you like to say your background and your title?
How did you get into this position? What inspired you to get into this position?
That’s interesting. Then now, what is your biggest challenge?
We’re very familiar with that.
Major League Hacking a B corporation. MLH has been a community first, mission driven organization from the beginning. We measure our success by the number of hackers we empower, and we want to keep it that way. That’s why we made it official and became a Certified B Corporation in 2016. B Corps are for-profit enterprises that are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their community, not just their shareholders.
Empower more hackers, MLH is an engaged and passionate maker community, consisting of the next generation of technology leaders and entrepreneurs. We are constantly figuring out new platforms, resources, tools to enable this community to grow.
Our mission is to empower all hackers.
[laughs] It’s very simple.
Exactly. We have five main missions we provide.
#1 - We provide the setting so that people can continue to empower more hackers. We empower hackers.
#2 - We also learn, build, share. Anything that we build is very much open source. We encourage the community to put out the resources that they learn in order to build even bigger communities.
#3 - What else do we do? We also take out the trash. You’ll see us randomly picking up trash at events to making sure organizers just have a good support system to believe they can do this! We don’t step away from anything.
#4 - MLH Provides. We leverage our resources and put it out there for anyone to access and take it to the next level. Just like today at VHacks.
#5 - Standard of Excellence. We take pride in the quality of the events we work with. Any official MLH event will be upheld to a high standard of excellence and we will work with these organizers to make sure that happens!
At the end of the day, we’re really trying to empower just the growth of technology and the talent to meet up with the technology. That’s really what we try to do.
Wow. That’s interesting.
For sure. It’s a constant pull.
Is this all internally in Taiwan or are you branching out to other countries?
That’s interesting.
The hackathons consist of professionals or students?
It’s the sharing of information.
No.
To connect with each other.
Based on some of the teams that you’ve met with, what is your takeaway from this? Also, what is your one word of advice for them?
Rather than just coding.
Awesome. I’m glad you had a chance to speak with Cameron. I’m really glad that you had a chance to view the hackathon space. Thank you for your time.
I am. Basically what is unique about us is we’re a connector of the technology. We have this hardware palette that moves from event to event. I think there’s so much more that we can do for the communities that are starting up that’s outside of just the hardware and an MLH rep.
Even just having community connections between countries is pretty important. I’m trying to figure out what value can we add to these countries that we can’t physically get to? We do create curriculum called Localhost that is open source that basically anybody can use to run within their community.
Yeah. We teach coding with Amazon Alexa. We teach Cockroach DB. We’re just building it as fast as we can so that it’s open source so that all these people can just learn more about these technologies and then go build their own projects.
We’re not trying to make money out of things that are created at these hackathons. We’re really just trying to give these students the tools and then have them figure out the solutions.
No, our team is quite small. We have 11 people full time. Then we have about 30 people who travel part-time. Normally I’m on the full-time staff. For this particular event, it was a bit more high coverage and I wanted to show up to share our story at MLH to the wider audience.
I oversee basically the entire league, all the 200 member events that we work with, but also try to think about how to expand the league to the rest of the world. Because we have a lot of knowledge and we have a lot of people with knowledge that we just want to make sure everybody on the continent has access to technology.
We haven’t figured that out quite well yet, but we know that we have a lot of open source resources that we could at least share and connections that we share because our network right now is about 65,000 in-person hackathons but a whole lot more digitally.
Digitally I think we have a much larger user base. People look to our brand to determine whether they’re going to go to a hackathon. That’s the case in Europe and in North America. That’s how it provided legitimacy for VHacks this weekend to a lot of hackers in attendance.
I’ve been trying to work with China a little bit. But it’s hard because I only have so much of myself to meet. I’m trying to figure out a forum that works that still adds value and keeps you all in touch with what’s going on, on our side of the continent.
If you’re ever in New York, [laughs] give us a ring. We’d love to...
Just tell us and stop by our office. You could meet our team.
Of course. They do a lot of great things. It’s an incubator basically, co-working space for all the social impact groups starting...
That would be great. Cool. Thank you so much.
For sure!
