Hackathon Organizer Interview: 05.14.2018

Interview with Progressive HackNight Team (5/14/2018)

Goals / Marketing

Identify goals - user testing, building a community, building a THING [WARNING: this is dangerous; odds are low]
Name and tagline are super important
Imagery and inclusive language - draws more diverse audience
Narrative should be emotionally motivating: Why do paperless forms MATTER? esp use numbers
People want to work on stuff that is going to LAUNCH, so mention that
Mention languages, frameworks, levels of expertise - before RSVP
Mention the structure of the day - esp high quality attendees want to know there is a PLAN

Budgets

Food: Breakfast + Lunch (<-- mostly this)
Pay: organizers, space
Self-promotion: swag, signage (recruiting)
Be clear about expectations - if partnering, be sure to have an MOU that includes: use of names, costs and who is responsible, food logistics (who / what / when), requirements for A/V, times, security - 'anything that can possibly come up in a space'

Press

Schedule

Day-long (~6hrs) = 1 hr intro / conclusion + 1 hr lunch + 4 hrs coding
Start with Context - presentation that is emotionally motivating and explains why they are here
On-boarding session first (1 hr)
Break out into groups to work
Purpose: do some work that has been pre-scoped for you (3 diverse projects, for example, or a list of well-labeled bugs with a diversity of difficulty levels)
Identify folks during the event who are taking ownership of the project or work so you can reach out later
Have a triage plan to deal with 'bad actors' who may show up at the hackathon, want to keep the rest of the attendees focused

Community Building - After the Hackathon

Have structure: Slack channel, coherent GitHub issues, email list
Ownership of OS community: Someone must be IN the Slack channel talking, sending emails, etc.
Communicate: launches, numbers or stats of the project so they understand impact
Contributions: many forms beyond PRs including filing bugs, writing blogposts, etc