What is a Jam?

A place to share ideas…

This June, people around the globe will come together at their GovJam sites to create new services inspired by a shared theme.

It’s a chance to unite with public servants, designers, students, academics, business people, unemployed people, customers, dads, moms, thinkers and doers. Ultimately, it’s a chance to bring your ideas, personality and creativity to help invent a service.

In the spirit of experimentation, innovation, cooperation and friendly competition, teams will have less than 48 hours to develop and prototype completely new services inspired by a shared global theme. At the end of the Jam their collection of brand new services will be published to the world.

This is a Jam...

Bouncing ideas, playing with what comes back. It’s building something new from the ideas you generate and you know what’s great? Together you have created something that none of you could have built alone. At the same time you are learning new ideas, discovering more about how you work and who you work best with, making friends and generally having one of those retreats that you think back on in the future and say – “I’m glad I was part of it.”

And it’s not just talking – you are here to turn your ideas into a concrete design, prototype and plan of action which you or somebody else might want to make real. Can you prototype and plan it in a way that someone could go out and make it real, knowing what resources they would need, what they should do, and who they should talk to? That’s the challenge of the Jam.

This isn't a Jam...

Now, conferences are good. But this isn’t a conference, or a lecture where you sit and listen. It’s not a place where you stand and talk all day either. You are here to work together, to design and plan something which has the potential to become real.

We love to meet and hear about people at networking events. But this isn’t a networking event. You’ll be making contacts and sharing knowledge in the best possible way – by actually working through ideas, plans and problems together.

If it isn’t a conference, then does that make it an ‘un-conference’? Nope. Although the Jam might be free form, there is a clear goal for the retreat – finished designs and plans which have the potential to become real, and which will be published to the world at the end of the Jam.

Also, it’s not a startup event. Yes, you’ll be working with strangers, starting an innovation cycle and bringing together the ingredients for a new service, but you might not want to work with them next week. And here’s the thing, a thriving start-up is a possible outcome of a Jam. But it’s not the goal.