Accord was created by a small team of software developers at a Hackathon in London.  The structure of this event meant that we had 24 hours, from 5pm on Thursday 24 November, to 5pm the next day, to come up with an innovative idea, implement it, and pitch it back to the other participants at the Hackathon.

 

Typically at these events, teams try to build a prototype version of a piece of technology.  We decided to challenge ourselves to not only build the technology for Accord, but also to launch the service, and get real people talking to each other, all within 24 hours!

 

For Accord to be a success, we needed not just a working technology platform, but also the people to use it: the service doesn’t work unless there are people on the other side of the debate for you to talk to!  Building up an engaged base of users in less than 24 hours was a massive challenge, particularly bearing in mind that for much of this time we were still figuring out what our service was, and how to brand and position it...

 

In the end, we got a really positive response on social media, including retweets to hundreds of thousands of followers, and even making it onto the front page of Hacker News, but sadly this didn’t translate into the volume of calls we were hoping for.

 

With the technology platform we have built so far, calls only get connected if someone with the opposing view calls in within a short period of time (however long the first person is prepared to wait in a queue, which turns out to be less than 30 seconds on average).  This works fine if you have high volumes of calls coming into the service, but we didn’t manage to get up to that critical mass of callers, meaning that lots of our callers failed to connect with anyone.

 

There are various possible solutions to this.  One is to let callers hang up & be called back when there’s someone available to talk to them.  Another is to reduce the duration of the event to create a "Flash Debate" where everyone who wants to take part calls in at the same time (we ran our first Flash Debate as part of our pitch at the end of the Hackathon, with about 150 audience members all dialling in at the same time, and it worked brilliantly!).  Both approaches have various issues that need to be worked through, though.

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So, what next for Accord?

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We all had a great time working on the project, and it was fantastic to see the level of interest and support for the idea.  We would love to find a way to take it forward beyond this point, but there is still lots to figure out in terms of whether we can run and fund the service in a sustainable way.  We will be looking at this in more detail, and discussing options, and will provide further updates when we have them.

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If you would like to provide support, and encouragement, please follow us and give us feedback and comments on social media (twitter and facebook).

 

Finally, we’d like to give massive thanks to everyone who shared, retweeted, commented or otherwise engaged with us on social media.  And extra special thanks to those people who called in to the service when it was available!

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The Accord Team

26 November 2016