World Cleanup Day was the thing I actually built in 2017

In early October 2017 I was in Tallinn, not Riga. I joined Garage48 Circular Economy at Spring HUB with people from the Let's Do It and World Cleanup Day network. The weekend was about turning environmental concern into something that could actually be used, which was already close to the kind of work I was doing then: software, communication, organizing and a very large civic idea all tangled together.

Our project was called World Cleanup Day 2018. Garage48 described it as a communication gateway for the worldwide civic movement. The official team record lists Kerttu Põder as product owner/project manager, Silvar Laasik as UI/UX designer, several back-end and engineering contributors, and me as the front-end developer.

That detail matters to me because it turns a vague memory into a concrete role. I was not simply around the event or registered for it. I was helping make the interface through which a global movement could become understandable and usable.

The team won the Favourite of the Audience award and also received a €500 special prize for a solution that was simple, scalable and resource-conscious. The emails after the weekend make the continuation visible too. On 9 October, the morning after the hackathon, Silvar wrote about the prototype and what should happen next. Over the following days we were still discussing the workflow, UX and who else to bring into the work.

This is the part of hackathons I keep returning to. The weekend is useful when it creates enough shared context that people can continue on Monday. A deadline compresses the conversation, but the real test is whether the thing survives the room.