Back in In 2013. I started one of the most interesting and elevating projects I worked on in my studency – MobilPRO.

A super collaboration between teaching staff, students and IT companies.

In the beginning, the team consisted of:

• professor Sever Pasca (otherwise the initiator and the director of the whole project)
• professor Eduard-Cristian Popovici, the representative of SAIM Lab – Services and Apps for Mobile Internet
• professor Pupezescu Valentin
• Diana Șandru, the representative of the League of Students of Electronics
• Loredana Gheorghe, joining a little later, the coordinator of the volunteers for the first edition
• myself, the representative for the LSE IT Department and the executive coordinator of this project

The team eventually extended a lot, counting 20 permanent members and over 500 volunteers in total in the 7 years of activity (as of March 2019).

We initially set out to organize a “contest of mobile applications for touchscreen phones” – the touchscreen was trending at the time.

The complete “official” name of the project is “𝐌𝐨𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐏𝐑𝐎 – innovation and mobility”, and in the first 2 years it was advertised under the headline “mobile apps and ideas contest”, eventually changed to “software apps and ideas contest”.

Of course, as an innovation contest, one of our main purposes as organizers has always been to constantly innovate the concept (so as not to be just a simple contest giving out diplomas), but also the processes through which everything unfolds (so we would be busy all year, not just during the contest)

In time, the concept evolved in 3 directions, becoming very complex (taking into consideration that it is a student project after all):

• TRAINING CENTER, hosted by SAIM Lab – Services and Apps for Mobile Internet, where Mr. Eduard-Cristian Popovici even succeeded in creating an optional course for the ETTI faculty, in which students can enrol to learn software and implicitly, get ready for the contest. What’s more, we constantly organize sessions of presentation skills within the training center with the participation of external consultants, and in the past this used to be done through another LSE project, a “generator” of conferences, workshops and all kinds of events with the purpose of supporting students in their first career steps – CareerTeam.
• COMMUNITY. The group MP – MobilPRO Community counts over 150 members, most of them former participant students, who are senior developers, architects, project managers or entrepreneurs today.
• CONTEST, meaning the initial idea. The contest has always been addressed to highschool students, students and master students; all of them at the same table, to compete equal to equal – because teams can be mixed and what is more, an additional participant outside the criteria can be added, acting as advisor. The six editions that have taken place so far have counted over 120 teams/250 contestants from 5 countries (Romania, Republic of Moldova, UK, Turkey and Bangladesh).

One thing the entire team is very proud of is that MP was the first mobile app contest in Romania. It was during a time when mobile apps were still in their prime; when touchscreen phones had barely become the norm. (Of course, it’s not exactly an official information, but we had published this for at least 7 years in our advertising campaigns and no one contested it :D)

Organizing slowly evolved; year to year we tried to come up with new things and to reinvent ourselves so that the contest would not only be up to date, but one step ahead of the times.

First of all, the contest sections. We started off with the vague “mobile apps” only to slowly introduce targeted sections, either technically or according to the class of users:

• Internet of things
• Intelligent automobiles
• Artificial intelligence
• Future of education
• Future of health
• Future of thinking

There are also a lot of very complex organizational elements, and I only mention a few, that emphasize quite well the attention we all give to details:

• Registration & participation form. From the first day of organizing we established an online mechanism that automizes our interaction with the participants. The form can be completed incrementally and updated by the participants and included information about team members, details about the application, documentation, the participants’ agreement for publishing details about the app, the source code for the app, branding elements of the team, Bucharest accommodation request, personal details for diplomas and appendix. Basically, the whole flow was automated with a former heavy workload, the value of which I would only understand a few years later and which I can still compare to other corporate projects. And all of this happened in an era when even Google Drive was in its cradle; in an era when Excel couldn’t yet be used collaboratively.

• Automated jury software system and custom-made “inhouse”. Well, first of all, I personally consider the jury system quite bulletproof – because the jury is formed of 3 parts: professors (30%), students (30%) and sponsors (40%). Each jury member assigns marks from 1 to 20, one for each of the 5 criteria (innovation, design, quality, optimization, presentation) in which they were specialists. For each app there would result an average per jury category, all these averages forming the final weighted average of the app. The final rankings show the top final averages per contest section. What is more, this jury system is also implemented as a web app with many other functionalities. One of the most recent versions of this app was the practical part of the diploma belonging to one of the most valuable and longest running MP members, Andrei Terecoasă, under the supervision of prof Eduard-Cristian Popovici. It is important to note that even though we weren’t working on this project full-time, we tried to make the most out of the assigned time, for the university but also for our own personal development. And we merged the extracurricular project with our academic activity as much as possible.

• Cloud storing live stream for a year. It may seem common now when everyone goes live on Facebook and Instagram, but in the beginning we had to find solutions without using modern social media platforms. The things we were doing at the time were actually more closely related to what TV networks are doing, because we processing the transmission in real time and that’s thanks to those at Online Video Network. In 2019 there were still many major demo days of some large hackathons that weren’t live streaming, and even if they did, they wouldn’t store them for so long 😀 2020 changed the rules a little bit though.

• Accomodation. We wanted to do everything we could to attract participants from other schools and we especially thought of the underage highschool students, for whom it would be a bit more complicated to travel to Bucharest for the contest. So we managed to get the consent of the Politehnica University to accommodate the participants and their supervisors in the Regie dorms. As a bonus, all those coming from outside the capital would be waited for when entering Bucharest/train station/bus station by someone on the team who would lead them directly to the dorms, as we had many efficient and available volunteers.

• Diplomas.Certificates. Appendix. Well, another thing we are proud of are these “papers” that would stand as proof of what the participants achieved in the contest. Every year we would carefully work on the diplomas so that nothing we offered would be written in pen; everything had to be on point before printing: name of the participants, teams, school, section they participated in etc. The appendix contained parts of documentation, the description of the project, technologies used, platforms on which they were implemented and the achieved results. Details that are very hard to get right and which wouldn’t have been possible without an automated flow for collecting all this data. And the hardest part – signatures and stamps. Participation certificates, appendices and diplomas for the winners, they all had to pass through the hands of 6 people that would sign them: the MP director, the dean of the ETTI faculty, the rector of UPB, the LSE president, the Training Center coordinator and the executive director of the project. Anually, over 400 x 6 = 2400 signatures for which we had to synchronize 1-2 day before the contest all 6 people… in a precise order 😀 I’m taking advantage of the fact that the text is pretty long and no one will read so far to mention that many of the diplomas were printed and signed only to have tolerance for all the possible scenarios, because I personally insisted that all diplomas look impeccable and not be manually filled 😀 And yes, the Certificates of participation, Appendices and Winner Diplomas were officially handed out by the University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest.

• Mixed jury. The jury chapter is of course very complex. Because of the very different components, we gathered together at the same table representatives of corporations with professors, first year students and entrepreneurs. Each with their own set of skills, expectations, vision and feedback for the student presentations. And it was very challenging to synchronize all of them, to have them assign time to be present, to assign time to study the project documentation beforehand or to limit themselves at assigning points for the areas they are specialized in only.

• Internationalization. Although we didn’t have many participants from other countries, during 2015-2016 we tried very much to set the scene for that. Website, presentation portfolio, poster, e-mails, rules – all translated in 5 languages (English, French, Italian, Spanish and German). We only started getting international participants by the end, but that wasn’t necessarily the purpose; during all this time we were very interested in our personal development as individuals, professionals and team-wise. And because we found in ETTI speakers of all 5 languages, we couldn’t just keep everything in Romanian without taking advantage of the translating potential we had – and so a small team under the umbrella of the organizing team emerged, “MP Translators”.

• Graphics & Video. There was always a lot of work regarding this area. Besides diplomas, certificates, appendices, posters and social networks materials, we paid special attention to the badges. We spent a lot of time annually to design the new badge: they were different depending on the type of participant during the contest day (sponsor, jury, contestant, coordinator, supporter, visitor etc.), always branded for partners and always including a complete guide with details about contest days: map, schedule and even different mottos, personalized for each category of participant. And just like the diploma case, the badges were generated before the event and printed directly with the name of the participants based on their registration on the website.

In addition to the live streaming videos, from the very first day MP had very complex video ads and compilations of the presentations almost in real-time. If in 2014 we used a few videos per year, by the last editions we almost had real-time stories that had already been assembled portraying parts of contestants’ presentations. That involves a lot of hardware resources and a lot of skill. Even though we also had a generously sized team that handled this for years, the main “technological and graphical revolutions” had been brought to us by 3 very important members of the permanent team, without whom MP would have never looked the same: Marian Stîngă, Cristian Preda and Emanoil Leonard Soare. I will not even mention the impeccable and professional photos we’d had for years on end, but unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t let me add enough tags (original Facebook post here); fortunately, each photo and photo album on the Facebook page includes credits to the photographers.

During all this time, LSE had another project going, assigned to a very big and organized team, called CareerTeam; a project specialized in organizing career events, among others.

And a part of these events had been organized with and for MobilPRO. Mentioning a few:

• Trainings for presentation skills, with Gheorghe Cristian Dragos, founder of Sports Business Academy and Sales Elite – Academia de Vanzari
• Trainings for startup your business with Florin Grosu, cofounder of Traderion. The game you ca pur on your résumé
• Communication trainings, with specialists from Orange and IBM Romania
• Meet Carlos Espinal Conference, Seedcamp Partner, the largest first-round fund in Europe at the time

Another project that is included in MP’s portfolio, as co-organizer, was HackSociety – a first try at creating a Hackathon in ETTI, at Eduard Mititelu’s initiative.

I also worked for a long time with the Robochallenge team, the other large ETTI contest, especially as many companies with the potential of becoming partners would rather fit in the hardware/robotics area. Together with Claudia Nedelcu, the Robochallenge’s executive coordinator at the time, we negotiated with a lot of partners.

Last but not least, the MP team participated 2 years in a row in organizing Droidcon Eastern Europe, the international conference for Android developers, along Ms. Carmen Ciulacu in 2014 and Alexandru Tintea in 2015. We were busy with organizing our events, of course, but we liked taking part in organizing other events; this is how we learn new things. Besides, we always had a large number of available volunteers who could offer their time ad skills. In the 2015 edition especially, we contributed with the flux of registration/check-in, graphics and photography. And on both editions we held our own presentations through our colleagues Diana Șandru (2014) and Paula Avasiloaie (2015).

The “cherries on top” regarding the “externalization” of our organizing force were 2 events outside of Bucharest. Google Developers Group Cluj 2015 and The Hack bootcamp Mamaia 2016. Both events were attended by representatives of the MP organization team. This time there was some kind of barter; for the offered support, Ms Carmen Ciulacu exchanged vouchers for the Informal IT School – Bucharest courses for the members of the Electronics Student League (LSE), courses which were followed for free by 8 colleagues before their first job.

We slowly came to collaborate with a lot of important names in the IT industry, who supported and sponsored us. Among these we can name:

• Samsung Romania
• Microsoft Romania
• Orange Romania, the main partner during from 2015 to 2019 through Orange Educational Program and my employer at that time
• IBM Romania, who stood beside us through all editions
• Freescale Semiconductor Romania SRL
• ALTEN Romania
• BearingPoint Romania
• Beia Consult Intl.
• Cisco Romania, who supported us each and every time with network equipments, through my university colleague, Ioana Manea
• Brainspotting
• Microchip Technology Inc.
• TeamCoding
• Power Digital Solutions
• Online Video Network

MP wasn’t just a contest in which students tested their knowledge and received prizes; not only volunteering and personal and technical development for the organizers, but a demonstration that the three sides (students, professors, companies) can work together so well. And the truth is that this is quite rare; somewhat paradoxical, taking into consideration that they share the same goal.

I know this is a long post, the longest I’ve written on Facebook so far. But if you read the article in its entirety, please PM me.

Along the way, many hackathons and demo days have emerged, seen from the outside they can look a lot like MP. This is one of the reasons why I wrote this post, to emphasize the differences and to present the less visible things that happened.

For me personally, MobilPRO was a project to which I dedicated a lot of resources. And for as much as I invested, I contributed to my own development just as much, covering a lot of areas:

• leadership and communication, because for 3 years I directly coordinated the activity of hundreds of volunteers; I always tried to find new methods of motivating them, to create a workflow as optimized as possible, to recruit the most suitable team members
• negotiation & persuasion, because I had always been in the middle and I tried to align the annual contest themes so that they satisfy all the sponsors of different profiles, as well as the university. A relevant part of this work we summarized annually in document called “MP portfolio”. One of the examples is found here
• technical, because I was involved in designing and implementing websites and systems used for judging and mailing

More than this, MobilPRO was also a successful try at connecting the worlds of which I was part of professionally at the time:

• 𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐈 Faculty, in which I was a master’s student/PhD student,
• 𝐎𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞, where I worked as a software engineer,
• 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐂𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠, the company I co-founded through a POSDRU programme,
• 𝐋𝐒𝐄, the organization whose board member I was for 8 years,
• 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦, the other major project I coordinated through LSE
• 𝐒𝐀𝐈𝐌, the lab where I worked on my diploma and dissertation

(see a detailed diagram here)

In the summer of 2016 I handed the responsibility over to Ana Moga and Roman Sebastian (an important role in the process had also Ruxandra Niculae – who was among the most prominent team members at that time), who later did the same and were followed by Alexandra Georgiana Serban and Alexandru Corlan. Until the 2018 edition, I acted as advisor to the new team and starting with 2019 I had began to participate only as a partner and member of the jury. The new teams did great and led the project to the next year each year and for this, I am really proud of them and I truly appreciate their offer and I consider each member of the team is a great professional.

There are a lot of people whom I worked with throughout all of these years and from whom I learnt a lot of things. People who handled graphics, logistics, photography, check-in, PR, communication, media campaigns, translations, sound, live streaming, room organizing, catering, cleaning, technical support, hosts and many other things… depending on availability, each and every one of them took their time to set out all those complex details I mentioned before. And for that, I thank each and every one of them – in my own name, in the name of the permanent MP team and in the name of the participants.

The 2020 edition that should have taken place at the end of March was postponed for safety reasons regarding the pandemic, and our colleague Miruna Andreea Dan is the one who will continue to write the story. 😀

The entirety of the story above has been captured and posted on Facebook and you can see it here.

The project has been discontinued for an undetermined period, since March 2020 due to COVID restrictions.