Professor Oliver Goodenough, Director of the Center for Legal Innovation at the Vermont Law School, attended the San Francisco Startup Weekend event that I facilitated and was inspired by the innovative and collaborative work that teams participated in during the weekend. He saw an opportunity to combine features of that event with part of his work back in Vermont, where he had often been asked by legislative committees in the state’s capital to provide policy suggestions to improve the state.
Combining his advisory experience in Vermont with what he saw at the Startup Weekend event and other hackathons, he conceived of a different type of event. Like a Startup Weekend event, the “Legithon” would also be a laboratory for experiential education. But, rather than building entrepreneurial skills, participants would be building skills that would help them become effective at policy creation. Instead of taking a startup project from idea to launch, citizen teams would take a policy ideas from creation to codification. In the process, participants could learn new skills that would be invaluable to them as community leaders.
A complete description of the event, additional photos, text of the legislation created is available here.