 Well, hey everybody, thank you for coming to our session. We'll be talking about engaging the FSI community for a good cause. I'm Sarah Calife, I'm a solutions engineer from GitHub. I actually have been working through a lot of FSI customers from a GitHub perspective and that's how I ended up meeting Leo. We worked on an awesome hackathon this last year and we'll be talking about that today. So I'll pass it over to Leo. Perfect, thank you. Let's see where we are. Okay, so Leo Hunkera, I am a managing director in the financial services practice for Microsoft within the, really around the financial services organizations within the community, I'm sorry, is that me? And I spent 10 years at Microsoft, came from the financial services organization there, that's where Sarah and I met, working with some of the largest financial services customers. And it was an idea that we had or that we would have been working on and it was all around really this person, my son Drew. He was diagnosed with autism at 16 months old. So it's something that, I'm not always 17 years old, but it was something that I sort of faced, all the challenges and all the things that we needed to overcome. It's a really intensive sort of therapeutic program that you put towards kids with autism. And he's a great kid, fantastic sense of humor, really sweet, but he's also faced with some very significant challenges. Like he cannot be left alone. He has to be with a one-on-one all day long. And so in my job, I would walk into organizations and I would see sort of, it was really around helping organizations adopt technology, you know, we call it digital transformation, but how do you transform industries, the work that you do, all of that, using technology. And I'd come home and I would see these archaic sort of pencil and paper and stuff like that being used in an incredibly data intensive practice with my son. And so, you know, the hackathon was really founded on how can I help him with the expectation that whatever we do is going to help a whole bunch of other people like him. And so that's really what caused us to come up with this idea. In, there have been a lot of things, joining Microsoft, Microsoft, EY, great companies, a lot of the companies that we work with, you know, Morgan Stanley's, Goldman Sachs and the more fantastic companies. And I found myself, you know, getting involved in a lot of initiatives around autism, autism awareness, autism employment hiring. I thought this was like a cause that I think I can, you know, I know well, and therefore I can have maybe a perspective on. But, you know, great things that we did, right? Awareness and during autism awareness day, we had like all the retail stores light up with autism awareness banners and the cube right there that you see on, you know, Times Square was lit up to bring awareness to the issue. All of these were great. I mean, they were fantastic, but got to a point where Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft and he had written a book about, you know, about his experiences. And it caused me to sort of rethink, you know, am I really bringing my unique set of capabilities to these causes? So great, you know, the work that we've done have been fantastic, but was it really sort of my unique value proposition or Microsoft's unique value proposition. So I wanted to hone in and do a little bit more around that. And I expressed this idea to somebody I know, Peter Smolovic, I don't know, he was presenting here from Morgan Stanley, I was covering the account and talking to him and said, I have this idea about hackathon. He says, let's do it, right? It was Peter just saying, we're going to tomorrow, let's go, right? And he started, you know, asking me for materials to send out to developers. We started pulling this thing together. And the next thing you know, we were, you know, running a hackathon. And we did the first one, we weren't sure that was, you know, 2018, right? We weren't sure if it was going to last or what was going to happen. This is just a great thing to do. And then the next year we had calls to do it again. And then the following year we did it, we realized, well, this is really sort of, you know, taking off. There's a lot of interest, a lot of demand. We had new groups coming in. There was developers from Goldman Sachs and American Express and NASDAQ, you know, just independent developers that started joining the group. And we realized that we got to think of this more than just a one year event that we do over and over and over again, but how we sort of extend it beyond that, how we have consistency, how we can build upon what we've done before. And that's where open source really had a big impact. And, you know, Sarah specifically and how she brought the GitHub perspective to this, the open source perspective to this and extending. I just wanted to jump in a little bit. You know, I mentioned the book. Satya was, you know, we gave this away at the first hackathon. It just happens that Satya has a kid with special needs, a son with special needs. And he mentioned how we sort of found purpose in bringing, you know, in the work that he's been doing, how people need to find meaning and purpose in their work and how that was going to be something that it was going to infuse into the culture, you know, and that it gave him a lot of empathy and understanding. And that's something that, you know, he felt Microsoft really needed and the people work they really need. And that's also, you know, looking at the quote here and some sections of the book, you know, the what we can bring to the world that makes, that's could be special in this area is why the hackathon came about. Like we have technology that can digitally transform it can be applied to this challenge. Why don't we focus on that specifically? And how can we also in the process bring meaning to the people who are working on these campaigns? To me, this was great because this is sort of how I thought about it. Just, you know, I've got my family and my personal piece, you know, that's, you know, a passion obviously around, you know, helping my son. Got my work, the company I work for, the companies I work with, you know, I mentioned Peter, friends of mine, you know, who worked at these companies and what we were supposed to be doing for them. And then this greater cause of how do we help the world and how do we go beyond that? The Office of Hackathon sort of hit all of them, right? I mean, there's really no difference between what I was doing for the hackathon and my job. I'm supposed to be teaching, you know, customers how to use Microsoft technologies for, you know, advanced, enlightening sort of experiences and novel ideas. And that was exactly what we did. So it just brought all the things that Microsoft had to bear. Peter, respectively, did the same on his side. You know, Sarah did the same on her side. We're teaching customers how to use GitHub. So we found it very easy to sort of get corporate support. And I think there's a lot of programs that, you know, benefit when everything is aligned in this manner. So that's the autism hackathon. Sarah's going to go a little bit deeper into it. But we started by, you know, having a set of principles. You know, those principles have been adapted over the years. This is the most recent one, the fourth one that we had. We sort of added the bottom piece there. So the continue the work through the open source community. The other ones were, you know, like I mentioned, harnessing the unique value proposition that we all brought. The second one is make it tangible immediate. It has to be meaningful, right? Not just something we wanted to show what the world can be, but also wanted to help people today. And then how do we continue this work so it's not just a one-time event? There's a little outline of the program here, but, and we've put the use cases. So we outlined the use cases in advance, knowing that, you know, we would be sort of the subject matter expertise in this area, knowing what the deficits were in terms of the capabilities being applied. But I'm going to let Sarah go through some of the more detail around the program itself and what we did there. Awesome. Thanks, Leo. Yeah. So what were some of the challenges that we had this year? Well, 2020, the pandemic overall was moving things virtually. We had a lot more remote work. Usually the hackathon is held in person, people fly in, all get to work together in one place. So a couple of different things that we had to think about this year and some of the things that we had to work through to make it easier for people to collaborate is moving virtual, remote work. People that participated are differently skilled. So some are developers, some are non-technical roles, but still wanted to participate. So how do we get them to really participate and contribute back to this somewhat technical type of hackathon? And we also wanted to build sustainable projects for the next years to come. As Leo said, when it first started, it started as a simple idea. It started, hey, let's do this hackathon, excitement all around. And then it got bigger and bigger every year. Things started working out to build out in the next year's hackathon. And how do you maintain that in some of the projects that have been done to make sure that they're sustainable for the next year to continue working and building off of those projects? So the first thing that we did, the first thing that Leo was mentioning is the use cases. So they actually created, we actually had four different use cases and we gave some technical descriptions, had some enablement around these use cases and then built awareness around these use cases. With these use cases, we're able to kind of scope out what the hackathon can provide and can consolidate in one place what teams should be working on. So then it's not necessarily open-ended not knowing where to start, where to go next. So with these use cases, again, they are just the four use cases that we had this year, but they can be adapted for the next year. They can be taken and really look through what other type of projects can really fit into these use cases to continue working on the hackathon or beyond, not necessarily during the two-day hackathon. Again, you can work on some of these use cases outside of the hackathon itself. The next thing we did is really get participants to be engaged. So the first couple of things were having a champion from each company that participated. What do we mean by that? Having the champion from Morgan Stanley going into Morgan Stanley and saying, hey, who wants to participate in this hackathon? Going into NASDAQ, going into AMICS, going into Goldman Sachs. There's just so many companies out there around working on developer type of work that can be there within the FSI community that can be taken and we can tap into that talent. And we needed these champions to really go into the company and take more of the information with them so then they can bring more participants into the hackathon. We wanted to market and build up excitement. So we actually built a website this year. We had a registration page in case you wanted to participate outside of the companies that were participating. We had an awesome flyer that we just used and made it easy to read, easy to consume just so people can understand what was going on. And we also had tech leads. So within each of these use cases, we actually had a couple tech leads that can help run the projects during the hackathon. Because in many cases, hackathons are great, but you can build anything and that's time sometimes overwhelming. You only have a couple of days. You have a couple of things that you want to build out and to really make something successful kind of have to scope it down a little bit. So these tech leads really learned about the use cases. We're able to share that information with the participating teams and really build up awesome projects that you'll see later on and partners. So I'll let Leo mention some of the partnerships that we actually built out through the hackathon to make sure that this was a successful year. Yeah, one of the important things was making sure that we had partners to be able to. There was great partner technology. We had an AI partner in there that could detect skeletal movements from video. So each one of the use cases, I went back to the product teams within Microsoft and asked them, what do you think you could do to the space? And they would sometimes give me a partner, oh, there's a great partner. Line Dance AI, if you dance to a song, they'll relate it to the song that you were dancing to. And they'll find the song. So I thought that was fantastic because we could do the same thing with autism. There were other partners that were in the field that potentially could take this technology and apply it to their solutions or their products, right? So how do we sustain this beyond it? So we had a couple of partners on that front. And then we've drawn from everybody, there's a PhD in Miami who was really interested in some of the technologies. He's the one who brought the Connect one to me originally because that's what it was, and now obviously it was a Connect for Azure use case. And then I think there was, there's another group I would love to see this year. There's a school in New York, Boses for New York, which helps with a lot of different kinds of training for kids with special needs. And that's one of the things that they do. Love to pull them into the fold this year as well. So I think pulling partners in was essential for this. Yeah, to maintain any sustainable product in general, having subject matter experts, having them for structure-rounded. So take that idea and put it into a hackathon, bring in different experts that really could help build out these projects. Then the next thing is, we mentioned we had developers and we had people ranging from all type of non-technical roles. How do we engage them to get participating and actually contributing back to these projects without having to know how to code, right? So these hackathons, these trainings, we want people to participate just to build out these amazing projects. They're all for such good causes and we have such great talent in the FSI community. So how do we bring that in? The training sessions from this year, we had so many of them because we had cross-regional teams participating. So we had multiple sessions on different Azure components. Some awareness sessions around autism and what some of the projects were around from the different scenarios. And we also had GitHub training sessions if you weren't aware how to use some of the components there. We just had ask me anything sessions where you can just jump in and really just ask anything that comes to your mind having trouble with this. Great, let's talk about it. Let's really look into it. The other thing was because we were virtual, we also recorded all these sessions. So then we can share these sessions with those that couldn't participate at that time. So it makes it easier to share that information, make sure that everybody's up to speed, make sure that everybody's understanding the use cases, the tools that we're using, so then they can contribute and really talk about what they were able to successfully do with their teams. Even from the non-technical roles, we talked about documentation, how do you build out this presentation, how do you build personas if you're a UX designer and so forth. So it really builds out a community and collaboration throughout this hackathon and you can see it from a lot of our work. So I'm actually gonna show a quick live demo of this. So I'm gonna end the show really quickly and see if we can see my screen here and go into our hackathon. So the first thing that we did actually is to provide, so I'll just actually jump back to slides really quick. The first thing that we did we wanted to do is provide synchronous and asynchronous communication. How do you get easy for people to communicate? You can't have everything be synchronous because people are across regions, across different time zones, different priorities in their days. Some people were working many hours a week but still wanted to participate. Maybe they didn't have time to message at the same time as everybody else. So we wanted to make sure that there's places for people to communicate both from a messaging perspective but also from a contributing perspective. So the first thing that we did actually is create a teams group where you can have multiple use case teams that you are able to communicate through messaging. In that group there, you can actually spin up video calls so then you can communicate synchronously as well as asynchronously. We had a general channel where Leo and I and other subject matter experts were jumping on to answer questions, to be able to help people if they were stuck on something, and so forth. And then with all of that we wanted to maintain a community. So what we ended up doing is consolidating the repositories of all the projects that were being worked on in a single organization. So if you aren't familiar, this is what GitHub looks like when you have an organization and you have repositories with an outgrown organization. This really allowed us to bring all the repos that were being worked on in one place and be able to share that. And what we ended up doing is incorporating some of the criteria for the hackathon around community and sustainability of these projects. So here you can see some of the projects that were worked on this year and then people can take these projects continue working on them outside of that time or they can take these projects next hackathon and build more upon them. So some examples of these are, for example, this is from use case three. They did an awesome data science kind of project using some of the data that were they're receiving from the field. And you can see they actually use the GitHub repositories and the GitHub Wikis and the readme to make sure that everything was communicated clearly and they actually use these as part of their demo. So then if somebody were to come in new, they will be able to pick up exactly where somebody else had left off and as well as making it easier for you to understand how do you even use this project if somebody is a subject matter expert from the field and wants to maybe take advantage of some of the cool things that were built, how do we jump in and learn about it so they can actually use it? So let's go back to the slides here. Oh, and this is our website that we built. So it actually made it easy for everybody to get their information in one place. So we had a lot of the event information here. We had registration. We had some pictures from the previous years when it was in person. But again, when you're moving to a virtual and remote world, you have to have easy access to information and make sure that it's sustainable. It's not out of date. It's not beyond what you're expecting just to make sure everybody's on the same page. So we'll go back to this. All right. So some of the criteria we had was the community sustainability side of things and the demo of the use cases. We had a cutliness of the GitHub repository. We had make sure that your use case was easily communicated and that your technical solution was easily communicated. And we made sure that the demo of the actual use case was a fun activity where everybody can join at the end of the day or at the end of the hackathon and really showcase what they've done throughout the year. I mean, throughout the hackathon. So Leah, I don't know if you wanted to talk about some of the cool projects here. Yeah, like these were sort of fun. This is from just a collection of pictures we put together. Put a link up on LinkedIn to communicate what was going on. And right here, one of them was an IoT device. So data collection. How people collect data. And it's very, like you can do it through a phone, but it's obviously very messy when you're trying to provide therapy and collect data at the same time. And some of the old mechanisms for doing it were great clickers, right? And so we wanted to create an IoT device, a printable one. So you can create any variation of printable IoT device that you wanted to collect data. Standard clicker like they had, one with five buttons on it, anything that you wanted to do, any pattern you wanted to do. Yeah, they 3D printed that one, didn't they? Yeah, they printed it. And they said, if we can put the 3D printable formats for it, then maybe you can print a format. And so this is an example of that use case, right? A 3D printable one, obviously that's a little bigger than we'd like, but it was really demonstration of the capabilities with buttons on it. You saw in the teams, there was like three different parts of it. They broke the team up. So one of them was printing and creating this. The other one was communicating, using a chip to communicate through a Wi-Fi to an Azure IoT hub. And so there was three different teams, one working on each component of it. And it was interesting, incredible demonstration. Two days, you're able to pull that stuff out with the kind of technology we have today. It's amazing. Second one was a mobile device to read using cognitive services at Microsoft to be able to extract language from a therapy session. So that over time, you can determine, you know, the progress in language and have just more data points around that. And this was an example of that extraction during a therapy session that you could do using a mobile device. And Power Platform, in fact, this was, I think that one was, there was a whole bunch, three different use cases encompassed in the data piece, but it was really around like sort of the money ball of data collection. All this data is being collected, but are we extracting information from it? I mean, marketers are able to tell what I'm going to buy before. I'm even able to buy it, yet we're not able to do anything close to that in autism despite the fact we're collecting all this data. And that's really where the idea was behind this one and sort of, you know, that always gets a lot of attention, always gets a lot of support for that one. And finally, ambient data collection through, you know, this was, there were two different aspects to this one. One of them was ambient data collection of, you know, of self-stimulatory behaviors. And the other one was an analysis of self-stimulatory behaviors and how, you know, in order to understand how programs can be, you know, targeted, better programs can be targeted towards different classifications, you know, of autism. And there seems to be a strong correlation there. There's a researcher from Miami who was involved in that one, so. Yeah. And so these are really all of them. You can see everybody participating in the event and all the different sort of outputs from the teams, which were super creative and a lot of really just intense effort by the teams, and it was just amazing to be a part of. I'd say it was actually one of the most enjoyable Zoom video, Skype video, team video calls ever, because it was just so heartwarming. Personally, I kind of wanted to tear up during some of the use case demonstrations. It was really, it was honestly, like, so nice, especially it was still technical, still working on amazing things, still tapping into an amazing set of talent that is existing within the FSI community, but really using it for a good cause and just seeing what people were able to do within a couple of days is just, you know, kind of mind-blowing and also just very different than what you normally have video calls about. So there's definitely such a fulfilling event that it made such a huge difference when you see all these different teams working on different projects and then that final day when you talk about these amazing things that we're being worked on, it really just brings it all together. This final demonstration day on a, you know, video call has, I felt like, was one of the most emotional video calls I've had over, you know, over other work calls that we've had before. I mean, emotional in a good way. In a great way. And I was like, this is just so heartwarming. But at the end of the day, we had some learning, some great successes. We had over 70 plus attendees, participants throughout the four different use cases, all working within multiple teams. FSI teams, some of the teams were more than just one company that we were working together. So it was actually, again, similar to what you heard from the sessions yesterday and the sessions today, about bringing and collaborating with other companies who are normally competitors to build something that is just for a good cause. It's just much more powerful to see how you can tap into this wonderful talent that we have and really build out something that will help not only the company itself, but will help the world overall. And the open source platform piece of it and the importance there is the fact that, you know, just judging from, you know, what I've seen in terms of the tools and techniques that are being used in order to help my son, you know, with like day to day stuff like crossing the street or learning how to cook or learning, you know, karate, like learning how to talk to a peer which he desperately wants to do, you know. All of those things, there's not a lot, there's such great technology that can be applied to these areas, but it is really, it's not a viable business model in most cases, right? This is specific technologies that can be impacted for specific individuals on specific areas. And so the solution that the open source, you know, provides in this case is that we have a, you know, just think about it, you can pull this code down and you've got a working POC, you know, that you can leverage in whatever product you want to from the start, right? And so the idea that open source can help improve the business model for companies in these areas for things that are really important to society and to families and people facing a variety of different challenges, there's just not an economic means for them to be built. And that's why I think this hackathon is trying to address that and open source is essential in making, you know, in making that a reality. And so I think I can't underscore the importance of this enough because I see it. You look for tools, they're not there and nobody's built them because it costs too much, right? Yeah, I'm from a sustainability again point of view. This year we were able to consolidate a lot of the projects in a single organization. It made it easier for us to bring all the information that we've worked on from the hackathon previous years and this year into one place so then at least it can be built upon, at least from the next hackathon and beyond but people can actually just go into the organization today and see what's out there and actually continue using or building upon those projects. The end of the day that was a very fulfilling event for not only the attendees but for the companies. It's just to have such a positive impact into the community that affects so many more people than you expect. Honestly, like I found out so many more of my co-workers have kids with autism because of this hackathon just because we talked about it and, you know, that's not something that you always talk about on day-to-day basis and making that impact from a very, very technical FSI community coming in and using that talent and tapping again into that community to leverage it for a good cause. It's just something that not everybody, you know, has necessarily time for on their day-to-day basis but when you bring it in and you make it around a community that's scoped down and you talk about all these different use cases it's just so much easier for people to jump on and work on it. And this year being remote we just had so many participants come from all different regions all different areas of the world and all different levels and skills that they have and just work together for a couple of days actually participate over trainings a couple of weeks before so they start working on a lot of these ideas and become a little more aware of what's out there over the previous weeks and those two days you just saw everybody hands down working on some amazing things. Yeah, and you hear people on the call during those sessions like just, you know, I think there's sometimes like shocked at how meaningful it is for them to participate and so that last two-day call we're going through the demos and everybody's showing what they've done it's not only the excitement of working with the team, you know it's also sort of the thrill of being able to put your skills to work in an area that really helps the community in a way that's incredibly tangible. We had the Ruse cases they were really understandable they were explained, you know, they're just, you know, it wasn't like a peripheral thing we're targeting the biggest challenges being faced in these fields and you just, I think it opens everybody's mind to this idea that what they do is really, really, you know, game changing and can be one applied. So any questions? Yeah, thanks everybody if you have questions. Thank you. Thanks a lot. If you have questions we'll be around and I know we are at the end of this session but we'll be around for, you know, outside of here so if you have any questions of how we work through things what Leo started how we ended up here today let us know and we can definitely chat about that. Thank you. Thank you.