Hackathon Lab-4
Hackathon Lab 4 focused on helping hubs move from orientation into real and practical implementation of the hackathon workflow. The session placed special attention on timelining, documentation and guiding teams into proper formation.
To ground the discussion, Prisma invited Morgan from Project Genius Hub (Zaria) to share their experience as a late-joining hub that managed to catch up quickly. Morgan explained how their hub activated an existing WhatsApp community of more than 260 people, introduced the core principles and encouraged members to walk their communities and self-organize into teams. Most teams formed naturally while hub leads supported the formation of others by matching skills and interests.
A key challenge Morgan highlighted was that many participants entered the process with fixed ideas about what problem they wanted to solve. Instead of discovering issues from their community walks, they tried to confirm their assumptions. The hub has been working to shift this mindset toward discovery, that is observing people, places and relationships first, then building insights from what they actually see. Early signs show this change beginning to take root, with participants noticing that their assumptions do not always match community reality.
On tools, Morgan and Alfred shared that documentation and timelining were initially confusing until a clarifying call with Tabs. After this, the purpose became clear: the Telegram bot provides a structured way for teams to record stories and learning over time. However, moving participants from WhatsApp to Telegram has been difficult. Some teams fear sharing ideas openly in a bot-enabled group, and as of the session, no team had started timelining. The hub has set internal deadlines with December 1 as a target to begin posting.
Delphi and Carlos expanded these lessons for all hubs and explained the two connected layers of work. First is the Docs space, where teams show how raw observations become problem statements using Ground Truths, Insights, Hypotheses and Opportunities. Second is the Telegram timelining process where teams post messages and voice notes into these same categories and the Prisma bot captures and organizes the data. Carlos walked through the practical setup steps: create a Telegram group, enable topics, invite the bot as admin, add the four “bot…” topics and begin posting.
During the Q&A, hubs asked how Prisma and evaluators would access Docs if hubs are self-hosting them. Tabs explained that all Docs links will soon be collected and added to a shared globe interface for easy viewing. Another repeated concern was several teams working on the same problem within a community. Facilitators noted that this is acceptable as teams may explore different angles of the same issue, so long as they remain grounded in real community data.
The session closed with clear expectations. Hubs are to complete or continue setting up their Docs, configure their Telegram groups with the Prisma bot and required topics and guide teams to walk their communities and document their learning using the Ground Truth → Insight → Hypothesis → Opportunity flow. Hubs were encouraged to book support calls when needed and to keep their learning visible for the wider network.