Emails with Evelyn of HackPrinceton

Mike's email to Evelyn:

Hey Evelyn, Thank you for this recap email and for hosting an awesome event. I was there as a mentor and helped a team hack together http://bubbleknows.com/

I did fill out the feedback form. The only criticisms were the lack of sleeping accommodations for the external attendees and the tables were a little old/dirter but the latter was a lesser issue.

I wanted to email you to reach out and get your feedback on an idea the team that I mentored has about creating a unofficial HackPrinceton Alumni (<-- insert word) group that meets casually once a month or so and continues hacking on their projects all together in the same space. To rekindle the magic that is produced at the main events and to create a support structure for continuing work and increasing knowledge sharing. NYC StartupWeekend has a meetup group that does this.

I mentored at HackPSU last weekend and plan to mentor at HackRU this coming weekend and I see many ways to improve and streamline the weekend-long hack-a-thon experience so that hackers experience much less downtime on starting up on their apps. Which led to the idea of having an unofficial hack-a-thon for hack-a-thon organizers or volunteers to build open-source pieces of infrastructure to improve the hackWeekend experience (ChallengePost & MLHacks just collect submissions and aren't open-source/lack APIs).

Lastly, this framework/infrastructure idea had the idea today could be used for hosting private family hack-a-thons, where hackers who've had the awesome experience of a hackWeekend can then take it back to their families (specifically the little ones) and have a model for them to host their own little mini hackWeekends. #ideas

Evelyn's reply:

Hi Michael,

That's a great idea to have meetups more frequently. I think the main areas we would need to address to keep this sustainable is money and mentors. Some other organizations have weekly Code@Nights or other open source events, and it's a challenge to get consistent turn out from mentors. Also, financing the event would be difficult, especially if we want to keep these hack events fun and filled with food. Right now we're working on wrapping up the event, but we're also encouraging our hackathon participants to apply to work on a project with eLab, a startup accelerator on campus. Those are definitely ideas that we're trying to incorporate to make HackPrinceton have a more long-term effect.

Thanks for the ideas! Evelyn