Decoding everything around the Free Your Data hackathon: Workshops and Engagements

To bolster the adoption of the Account Aggregator framework in India, we at Setu — a fintech startup based out of Bangalore, tied up with GitHub and Devfolio to run a two-week-long hackathon. We invited participants from the length and breadth of the country to build a variety of products on top of our Account Aggregator sandbox.

With exciting cash prizes of INR 5,00,000, GitHub SWAG, and thoughtfully curated masterclasses, fireside chats, mentorship hours, and thrilling games — read on to know how the two weeks between September 24th and October 10th unfolded.

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Sweet bytes of engagement#

We started out with a brilliant kick-off event that saw the likes of Dr. Pramod Varma and iSPIRT volunteer Aaryaman Vir. This was followed by two brilliant modules created by our awesome in-house design team — we focused on helping participants “build customer-centric FIU apps” by sharing curated videos along with the findings of D91 Lab’s Future of Data Sharing project.

We spent our weekends hosting kick-ass workshops and masterclasses by popular developers like Irfan Shah and Sriram Narayan, on insightful topics like ‘Lessons from Open Source’ and ‘Relationship advice for API providers and consumers’. One of the masterclasses also saw popular fintech veteran Vamsi Madhav from Sahamati where he set context on how the collective has been working towards bolstering the adoption of Account Aggregators and the plans they have for its future.

Now, for the fun side of things — we put together a brilliant virtual space on gather.town, a popular online tool that lets participants log in through their avatars (think Minecraft meets Gameboy Pokemon). We used this to host mentorship hours, where developers from Setu solved queries and answered questions. We even hosted a couple of online games like draw battle and treasure hunts where we gave away Amazon gift vouchers. Our most popular virtual session was Setu’s hiring hours where we had participants flock in to ask questions about our products, interview processes, and internship opportunities.

BTW, did you know that Setu is hiring across the board? Check out our careers page. (Shameless plug, we know!).

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Fireside chats#

Since Twitter Spaces is a new and hot feature, we thought it might be fun to explore it and invited popular fintech leaders and founders to chat with Setu’s co-founder and chief evangelist Nikhil Kumar. This saw the likes of Sanjay Jain, Kamya Chandra, Amit Jain, and Nithin Kamath (whose fireside chat saw more than thousand audience members).

We plan to do this more frequently since this breaks away from traditional webinars and lets Tweeps join in on our chats just through the click of a button — casual and fun are the themes we’re looking at. Follow us on Twitter to know when we host the next one.

If you’re curious about what the final projects, and judging looked like, make sure to check out part two of this article where we’ve unfurled everything around it!