Hackathon Be Gone
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Hackathon Be Gone
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Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#2I'm sure good work comes out of these, but I think it would probably happen anyway. I really don't understand why people are going to these things still.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#3I've been organizing Hackathons for the past few years. They have been incredibly successful in a number of ways.
The group that organizes them has recognized a few powerful factors:
- The organizers are diverse and have a wide array of skills
I didnt start the group that I have collaborated with, but I immediately tried to contribute to the best of my ability. We have people who are good at promoting, thinking about diversity, good a logistics, organizing speakers, etc.
- Intentionally diverse groups in gender/skill/background
We spend time to open applications, then manually select the participants who are accepted. From there, we keep a high touch relationship with 100-150 people, so that they are excited even before attending.
- Pre-crafted/well-rounded teams
Based on applications, we make pre-crafted teams that have balanced skill sets. We make these teams based on our understanding of the participants, and their own experiences.
- (most importantly) NO PRIZES
We make our events based on the valued gained from meeting and working with people who are fundamentally interesting. We build the concept of the event based around getting cool people together to work on cool problems.
For the past two years, we have welcomed well over 600+ people in 4 different cities.
- Partner with awesome organizations with strong brand names
We spend significant amount of time to raise sponsorship. We make a point to involve cool organizations in the space, so that the event attracts high quality participants. Even if a great organization that we like cant sponsor money, we try to involve them as a partner in someway, so we can involve their staff. This has always paid off.
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Reference:
- http://hackingjournalism.com/mobile/ (Based on mobile journalism at MIT in Cambridge)
- http://hackingjournalism.com/video/ (Based on video production at Conde Nast in New York)
- http://hackingjournalism.com/ (Based on data science at Washington Post in DC)
- http://codexhackathon.com (Based on book publishing at SF and Boston)
- http://audiohackation.com (Based on podcasting with ThisAmericanLife in New York)
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#4I stopped playing CTFs because the crunch time was too much. Burning a weekend reverse engineering and programming is fun, but then I lose the weekend. I'd like to see some casual CTFs / hackathons. Extended timeline, a few weeks to a month, fine if people with jobs play for fun.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#5I've been organizing Hackathons for the past few years. They have been incredibly successful in a number of ways. The group that organizes them has recognized a few powerful factors: - The organizers are diverse and have a wide array of skills I didnt start the group that I have collaborated with, but I immediately tried to contribute to the best of my ability. We have people who are good at promoting, thinking about…
I'm curious: how do you market these events? I have literally never in my life encountered a hackathon directly and only know they exist because people talk about them; they are a purely theoretical construct in my world. Through what channels do people discover your events?
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#6The only "thon" I am willing to hack is my own.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#7I stopped playing CTFs because the crunch time was too much. Burning a weekend reverse engineering and programming is fun, but then I lose the weekend. I'd like to see some casual CTFs / hackathons. Extended timeline, a few weeks to a month, fine if people with jobs play for fun.
Something like MicroCorruption of CryptoPals, then?
(I haven't tried Star Fighter yet, but I imagine it's similar too.)
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#8Your commercial and competitive hackathons are already covered well by TopCoder and similar competitive programming competitions. There are commercial challenges which generally build against some kind of proprietary API. Then there are competitive Single Round Matches (SRM) which are purely data structure and algorithm based.
Grandstanding and networking sound like b-school entrepreneurship competitions. Who can make the best slide deck. Plenty of companies got funding with nothing more than a few presentation slides and some good talk so I agree it's a potentially valuable thing. It just doesn't reward technical prowess so why feature it at all?
Hackathons are a blend of all of this and it doesn't really do any of them well.
My main complaint about hackathons is that they are a poorer recruiting tool than most people want to believe. Corporate sponsors think they'll be able to spot top talent easier. And some participants think hackathons improve their chances of getting hired. In my brief experience, the success rate is very low on both sides. At best, I think a hackathon is a fun, creative, and social collegiate experience for the participants and another avenue for companies to market their brands to impressionable young minds.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#9I've been organizing Hackathons for the past few years. They have been incredibly successful in a number of ways. The group that organizes them has recognized a few powerful factors: - The organizers are diverse and have a wide array of skills I didnt start the group that I have collaborated with, but I immediately tried to contribute to the best of my ability. We have people who are good at promoting, thinking about…
I'm curious: how do you market these events? I have literally never in my life encountered a hackathon directly and only know they exist because people talk about them; they are a purely theoretical construct in my world. Through what channels do people discover your events?
https://mlh.io/seasons/s2016/events Is very popular for promotion.
Re: Hackathon Be Gone
#10I takes me the better part of six months to build something worthwhile. I know I'm a slow programmer but it's still hard to see that anything but trivialities can be built in a weekend.