The Halfway Point

We now have two weeks completed in our assignments. Hard to believe that we are at the halfway point already! In many ways, it seems like we have been here much longer than only two weeks! In other ways, of course, it seems like we are still trying to gather everything we need.

The entire team has really come together, to be a large and happy family. The entire team is more than willing to help each other out. This was evidenced by each team providing help, slides, and lessons learned from their Design Thinking workshop to the other teams. We love to have dinner together, and do a lot of sight seeing together. The team definitely has fun together! We have all learned each other's personality quite well at this point. We also continue to get input and guidance from our four fabulous facilmentors! There has been much coffee drunken together!

All four teams have spent lots of time doing interviews and gathering research. We've had the opening kickoff session, which was exciting for us, especially hearing the encouraging and inspirational speeches. By the end of week two, all four teams had also completed their Design Thinking workshop with their member association. Planning and delivering the design thinking workshops definitely stressed out every team! However, all four teams had a successful workshop. We are also definitely gathering feedback for the CSC program.

Besides working every day with our associations, we spent time after work one evening with Zsuza Molnár (the Program Manager for Digital Opportunity Trust, the NGO working with IBM on our CSC Hungary 1 assignment), to brainstorm on exactly what we should do for our CSC Community Day. We have to do something with 14 or more Hungarian startups. We came up with an agenda and ideas on how to run the day. At the end of this second week, Saturday was a full working day. The entire team again met with Zsusa and the four program ambassadors to finalize plans for the Community Day. We broke into teams to deliver the content, and set our teams for our various consulting stations. Since we are delivering Design Thinking training, a group spent the majority of the day building the materials for the training and fine tuning the delivery plans.

As we look forward to our final two weeks, each team has a lot of work to complete their final deliverables. Plus, we need to prepare for the final ceremony, an IBM Hungary Town Hall meeting, and a true CSC debrief session. So two whirlwind and exciting weeks over, and two probably even more hectic weeks to go! Probably everyone needs an extra suitcase to get our memories home from Budapest!

Brian, Cheska, Cathy, Ranjan, Rosana, Gautum, and Ruby Ann at Fisherman's Bastion

Dani, Brian, Cheska, Lindsay, Rosana, Mario, Syed, Trang, Ann, Ruby Ann, and JoAnne at dinner

Trang, Cheska, Cathy, Rosana, RubyAnn, and Syed

Having coffee - JoAnne, Cathy, Ruby Ann, Zsofia, Mario, Trang, Brian, Dani, Lindsay, Rosana, Syed, Dora, and Cheska

Sub-team 1 having coffee with Dora (last time we'll see her in Budapest) -- Brian, Roland (our Program Ambassador), Dora, Rosana, Cathy, and Ranjan

Team getting silly with IBM logo merchandise -- Dani, Syed, Gautam, Ann, Trang, Mario, and Ruby Ann