Opportunities for bright minds to collide are never enough

This was the mission we aimed to pursue at WeCamp, a 2-week bootcamp near Milan to learn and share ideas on a wide range of tech and social innovation topics.

Antonio and I rented a house with an enormous garden, a pool and a Wi-Fi connection to smart-work together in this post-emergency phase. After booking such a location on Airbnb we immediately realized its true potential (apart form diving for a few minutes in the middle of the workday – wow!) and -like in a movie- at exactly the same time, we sent each other a message like ‘why don’t we organize an hackathon?’

This initiative was a way for me and Antonio to give back to the community by spreading knowledge among eager people. We wanted to pull together the brightest, hungriest minds in the area to explore together those we believe are the 5 most important topics that will shape our future:

• Education: all starts from there – providing the right competences to everyone since the early age is the first step in making the world a better place
• Machine Learning/ AI: this revolution is changing our lives,  like never before (for the better?). We believe everyone needs to understand (at least) the basic concepts behind this and become aware of its true potential
• Gene editing: the DNA is the code written by Nature to regulate our amazing lives – but imagine we really get to grasp it and tweak it. We all need to understand how this might unlock today’s unachievable frontiers and which ethical concerns may arise from that
• Immortality: is this the ultimate goal of our species or of each of us? Today, cryonics provides the opportunity to freeze your mind/ body with the hope that medical progress will -one day- be able to unfreeze it bringing you back to life. We want to spread awareness on this kind of forward “time travel” technique.
• Entrepreneurship: without people actually doing stuff, all the above points will be just nice talks without any tangible impact. We need to encourage people to act and deploy progress to the real world

Indeed, we worked a lot (oh man, you really can’t see how hard it is until you do it) to set up those great events. It was worth it in the end: the feedback was great – pushing us to replicate WeCamp again… well, why not?

Give a look at our teaser video below and our website to learn more weCAMP.club (Italian only) and stay tuned for future editions!

Lessons learned

• If you offer people something you think they can’t refuse, bad news is that they can still refuse. Great products still need great comms!
• We adopted a first-come-first-served policy,  but ended up compromising the diversity of our audience. Do not underestimate the power of having several points of view
• Setting up an event location is tough as well – do a proper inspection of the place several days ahead!