The screen behind me showed 4:39. I had five minutes to explain a system we had built in 36 hours, in a room near Paris, while a leaderboard waited behind the demo.
The video is titled “IGATE / Capgemini BPW Hackathon Presentation,” was published on November 8, 2015, and identifies the event as Business Priority Week that November. I was presenting OurUniversity, a prototype for making workplace learning social, measurable, and worth returning to.
What Business Priority Week was
Business Priority Week was part of Capgemini University’s internal learning program at Les Fontaines, the company’s campus near Paris. Capgemini described the format as a blend of classroom learning and activities organized around strategic priorities, meant to create a shared language across teams. In 2015, the university reported 3.3 million learning hours for more than 161,000 participants.
The company’s 2015 annual report gives the hackathon more shape: designers and developers from six international teams, including an IGATE team, built application prototypes in 36 hours. The target was not a generic demo. It was the experience of people learning through Capgemini University.
The timing matters. Capgemini completed its acquisition of IGATE on July 1, 2015, adding roughly 30,000 colleagues. By November, this stage was also a small piece of integration in public: an IGATE team contributing to a Capgemini-wide learning event only months after the deal closed.
The problem was isolation
The pitch opens with an observation that still holds: learning weakens when it happens alone. A course catalog can store material, but storage does not create curiosity, accountability, or a useful sense of progress.
OurUniversity started with identity. A learner registered, selected an avatar, and could remain pseudonymous while participating. That was a thoughtful tension for 2015. The system wanted social interaction without demanding a public profile as the price of entry.
From there, the demo moved through a working loop:
- Understand yourself. Graphs compared the learner with their own earlier activity, turning course history into a visible trajectory.
- Find people. A short identifier or QR code added a friend without requiring a broad directory search.
- Compare interests. Peer views showed differences across areas such as machine learning and data mining.
- Choose and complete work. The catalog exposed courses, ratings, usage, downloadable presentations, scores, and retakes.
- Create a reason to return. Challenges and trophies connected learning outcomes to another person.
The product model behind the demo
Under the interface were five related models: a pseudonymous identity, a course catalog, a progress record, a peer graph, and an incentive ledger. None was especially powerful alone. Their value came from the joins between them.
A completed course updated the progress record. Progress changed the graphs. Topic activity improved discovery. A peer challenge gave the next course social context. A high score produced a trophy that could be shared or contested. The demo’s memorable line was that it was both a game and learning, but the deeper idea was a closed feedback system.
The prototype turned a training catalog into a small social economy of attention, evidence, and recognition.
Designing a learning loop
Our University brought recommendations, ratings, course affinity, peer relationships, scores, and recency into one connected experience. The aim was to help people find relevant learning, understand their progress, and have a clear reason to return.
Trophies were designed as active social stakes rather than inert badges. A learner could challenge a friend and risk losing a trophy if the friend achieved a higher score. I joked on stage that it sounded like betting on education, but the mechanism served a serious purpose: turn recognition into another moment of participation.
A contemporary version would be more restrained with comparison, make recommendations easier to understand, and give people stronger control over visibility. The enduring ideas are privacy-aware identity, progress over time, social accountability, and a direct path from insight to action.
Five minutes, one coherent journey
The presentation followed the same sequence a learner would experience: register, choose an identity, inspect progress, connect with someone, discover a course, complete it, improve a score, and receive recognition. That narrative made an ambitious prototype understandable within a five-minute stage slot.
Looking back, the work connects naturally to how I approach distributed systems today. Independent actors need identity, discoverable state, coordination rules, observable progress, and feedback. In 2015 those actors were learners rather than services, but the design challenge was already about helping a network behave coherently.
The video preserves the moment: the Capgemini screen, the BPW leaderboard, the countdown, and a newly combined IGATE and Capgemini audience watching an idea move from isolated training toward shared momentum.