How to Organize an Impactful Hackathon

By Love Dager

In this chapter, you will learn all of the technical details of running a hackathon; this includes all the relevant communication needed to make sure everyone knows all the important information, what platforms to use to manage the hacker teams, the mentors, the jury members, and the submitted solutions, and last but not least, how to manage the scoring procedure. This chapter will also cover how to set up the jury and jury criteria for a successful hackathon.

In this chapter, we will look into the following topics:

• Creating diverse teams
• Hackathon platforms
• Submission and evaluation
• Online hackathon versus In Real Life (IRL) hackathon
• Jury process and setup
• Opening, closing, and prize ceremonies

Creating diverse teams

A lot of science from different fields of study shows that diversity is a key part of innovation – you need people to spark each other’s creativity, and that comes from thinking differently. For example, workers at companies embracing two-dimensional diversity are 45% more likely to see an increase in market share from the previous year and 70% more likely to report that their company entered a new market (reference: Harvard Business Review, December 2013, by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Melinda Marshall, and Laura Sherbin).

Note

To understand this in greater detail, you can visit the following links:

https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation

https://vbn.aau.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/203812913/Diverstity_RP_2011.pdf

And, when we talk about diversity, we mean it in every possible way – diversity in gender, age, nationality, ethnicity, background, field of study, profession, and more.

At Hack for Earth, we encourage...

Hackathon platforms

Hackathon platforms are where you communicate with stakeholders and where the hackathon takes place, so to speak. In this section, we will delve into the communication channels needed and the types of platforms we recommend using in these communication channels.

As you’ve probably noticed by now, there’s a lot of information that needs to be communicated to a lot of different stakeholders; mainly, these stakeholders are hackers, juries, mentors, and partners. As partners and mentors are easily managed over email, this chapter is going to focus on hackers and juries.

In addition to communication, we’re also going to cover submission and evaluation of the solutions that hackers create during the hackathon, as well as how the Meet & Match team creation activity works in practice.

Communication channels

We at Hack for Earth mainly use five communication channels. The following setup has slowly evolved over the years and now functions...

Submission and evaluation

At Hack for Earth, we tend to use the same platform for submitting and evaluating the solutions of hacker teams, even though this is not strictly necessary. When we started out making hackathons, we asked the teams to send in their solutions over email, and then we made an Excel spreadsheet for the jury to mark their scores in! Those were exciting times, and although it probably still works well for smaller hackathons (fewer than 20 teams), most of the time you’d need to have some better structure to the process to make it more clear to everyone involved how solutions will be made, submitted, and scored and what is required to win. There are several hackathon platforms on the market, and all of them have their respective pros and cons. At Hack for Earth, we have tested a lot of them, and we choose the platform according to our needs for the hackathon at hand – different hackathons need different hackathon submission platforms. We will delve deeper...

Online hackathon versus IRL hackathon

One of the key decisions one has to make early in the hackathon planning is this: Are we creating an online hackathon (also called virtual or digital) or an offline hackathon (also called physical or IRL)?

Most of the hackathon process is the same regardless of whether it’s online or offline, but here are some differences worth mentioning:

• Information and communication are much more important for an online hackathon, as hackers can’t simply walk up to the staff and ask for clarification as they can at an offline hackathon.
• Livestreams have to be more concise than stage appearances as the attention span is shorter while watching a livestream. In our experience, a livestream at an online hackathon can never be longer than 1 hour, while an opening ceremony live on stage at an offline hackathon can easily be upward of 3 hours as long as it is entertaining.
• Everything takes longer online, meaning that the overall hackathon...

Summary

Now that you have finished reading this chapter, you should have a good understanding of the different aspects of organizing a hackathon. You’ve delved deep into the technical intricacies of organizing a hackathon, covering a range of crucial aspects.

This chapter underlines the components essential for orchestrating successful hackathons, with a particular emphasis on the vital role of assembling diverse teams. To cultivate this inclusivity, we recommend implementing strategies that promote wide-ranging participation. These strategies include creating opportunities for individuals from different backgrounds to join teams, as well as organizing events such as Meet & Match.

Further detailed within this chapter is the indispensable nature of effective communication in the planning and execution of hackathons. It stresses the importance of leveraging a variety of channels – from websites and social media platforms to emails, videos, and interactive chat...