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Accent Hackathon. If you decide to organize a hackathon

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a hackathon for the first time! The purpose of the event was to develop viable business ideas that can improve the state of environment the Baltic Sea. This three-day brainstorm took place in the center of Helsinki with 12 teams, including mine. Unforgettable and priceless experience!

What is a hackathon?

The word "hackathon", which came from the IT world in 1999, means an intensive collaboration of programmers, designers and managers to solve a specific problem (for example, creating new software).

Currently, hackathons are also gaining popularity among businessmen, researchers and even politicians. Moreover, hackathons are just created so that all of the above specialists get together and everyone contributes to the development of an idea / project.

As a rule, there is not one, but many teams at a hackathon. First, the organizers of the hackathon announce the main task, then the candidate teams apply for participation, the best ones enter the hackathon and fight for the main prize. The event usually lasts for several days, during which the teams work intensively on the project, consult with invited specialists (experts) and prepare a presentation of the project for the final day, where the jury determines the winner.

The organizers also take care of the food and leisure of the participants. All this is done in order to create a creative atmosphere of the event, in which the teams also find time for joint recreation and communication with each other. Thus, each participant of the hackathon gets useful professional experience, the opportunity to personally meet experts in their own and other fields, and just have fun, and the winning team will also receive a cash prize for it!

Hackathon DEEP Challenge - from theory to practice

The main task of the hackathon DEEP challenge was the creation of conditions for the development and implementation of commercial ideas that contribute to the improvement of the environmental situation in the Baltic region. To do this, a month before the event, the organizers announced the acceptance of applications from teams with business ideas and invited more than ten experts in various fields of activity (from researchers and engineers to businessmen and politicians). Among 70 applications, based on the opinion of the expert council, 12 of the best were selected, including my team.

Hackathon DEEP challenge was organized in the center of Helsinki in the conference hall of the water complex Allas Sea Pool, a feature of which are three open-air swimming pools directly opposite the shopping area Kauppatori. Unfortunately, I did not have time to swim in the pool or take a steam bath in the sauna, although the organizers provided this opportunity to all participants of the hackathon for free.

The task for the hackathon participants was clear: to develop their idea into a realistic business project and present it to the public on the final day. The hackathon started on Friday evening and ended on Sunday afternoon. The event was hosted by such a charismatic Finn, a well-known presenter of one of the Finnish radio stations.

Friday - warm up

The first day was for a warm-up: the mission of the hackathon and the task for the teams were announced, a couple of competitions for ingenuity were held, and then everyone went to dinner together. This allowed participants from different teams to get to know each other, with experts and organizers. I must say that we were well fed, which also contributed to the creation of a friendly atmosphere of the event.

Saturday - Brainstorming

The second day can be safely called a brainstorming session. On this day, each team had the opportunity to discuss the idea with several experts (30 minutes each). For example, our idea was dedicated to the creation of an underwater weather station and was criticized by various experts from engineering, economic and environmental points of view. In addition to criticism, of course they gave us advice on how to improve the idea, make it more realistic and commercially viable. In addition, we have received contacts of potential clients and partners who are likely to be interested in the project.

Immediately after the sessions with the experts, the organizers stunned us with the fact that each team must do and send them a presentation of the idea and business plan before 9 pm. We had only four hours to patch up all the flaws of the idea, implement the recommendations of the experts and fit it all into a three-minute presentation! That is why my team chose to work more on the project instead of going to the sauna and pool.

Sunday - presentation

Early in the morning I wrote the text of a three-minute speech and repeated it in the train, because. the final of the hackathon began in the morning: the speeches of the team leaders. Not all speakers were able to keep within 3 minutes and the host abruptly interrupted them, saying: "Your time is up." I ran into a problem that the animation in my presentation did not work, because. the organizers converted it to PDF (a good lesson for the future!).

After the presentation, the jury asked 2-3 questions about the project. Interestingly, in this hackathon, the jury was not made up of experts who could evaluate projects and progress during the competition from different angles, but the sponsors of the hackathon (representatives of banks and grants)

After the performances there was a final dinner, or rather brunch(in Russian: breakfast + lunch), which is a buffet of dozens of dishes and desserts. By the way, in my opinion, desserts are the most forte Finnish cuisine!

And finally, the jury is ready to announce the winners of the hackathon: alas, this time it was not us. The winning teams were awarded small cash prizes (€1,500, €1,000 and €500 for first, second and third place, respectively). On this hackathon DEEP challenge was finished.

Conclusion

So, what can be said about the hackathon? In my opinion, this is an extremely productive form of joint work on the development of ideas. Firstly, hackathon is an ideal platform for the rapid development of projects: in just three days, from a raw idea, we got a good business plan, as well as feedback from both narrow specialists and the general public. Secondly, it is very convenient to advertise your idea on a hackathon: I personally met potential partners and clients with whom we can implement a project in the future. Thirdly, experience of short speeches and communication in an entrepreneurial environment is something completely new to me. After all, where else can you taste for free tasty food, go to the pool and take a steam bath in the sauna? :-)

This week, from November 18 to 20, an unusual event will take place in St. Petersburg - the first All-Russian hackathon hackRussia. For three days, schoolchildren and students will be able to try their hand at mastering professional cases from five areas - social services, finance and blockchain, agriculture and energy, education and culture, biotechnology and medicine. The Gorod + correspondent decided to figure out why such an unusual format is needed, how does a hackathon differ from a regular forum, and how effective is it?

The word "hackathon" is formed from two English words to hack (explore while programming) and marathon (marathon). The term first appeared in America in 1999. This is a special format in which participants for a limited period of time non-stop create not abstract solutions to the problem under discussion, but prepare specific products in the form of, for example, websites or mobile applications. According to the rules of the hackathon, the guys are divided into teams of two to four people. To win this race, you need to have a whole range of skills and qualities: natural curiosity, good communication skills, a sharp mind and a command of programming languages.

This approach is extremely relevant today, because students get the opportunity to interact directly with employers and enterprises. This allows them to correctly assess the needs of the modern labor market. A hackathon is also useful in terms of a quick and targeted exchange of knowledge and competencies between specialists from different fields, which also enriches the “professional baggage”.

The hackathon differs from the usual forum in the mobility of the workflow: on average, in 40 hours, participants must go from developing an idea to creating a working prototype. It is especially important that final result should be practically tangible and could be applied in one of the spheres of human life. After all, there are investors at the event who can allocate best projects and implement them. In addition, this affordable way show young professionals the interest of the industry in their work and knowledge. Students' confidence in the future will help to avoid "brain drain".

For the first time, a nationwide hackathon will be held in St. Petersburg this weekend. Before that, of course, such events existed, but they were highly specialized and local in nature - basically, such “competitions” were held on the basis of individual companies, at the sites of universities or among programmers. Only now has it been possible to create an organized movement covering a variety of areas: it is planned that about three hundred participants from 45 cities will come to the opening ceremony on Friday, November 18.

Within a few days, schoolchildren and students will try to implement their work in five areas. As project manager Denis Samuilov said, various solutions will be proposed, for example, on the problem of drug distribution. “This case will be presented in the direction of medicine. In pharmacies, medicines often change in price. And they are not always available. We can aggregate this and do searches not only by the name of drugs, but also by generics (cheaper analogues. - Approx. ed.),” the specialist explains.

In addition, there will be a number of other useful projects at the hackathon: on the basis of Tinder dating applications, mobile applications will be developed for optimal housing search. And in the field of agriculture, they will think over ways to deliver products to the consumer as fresh as possible. It is impossible not to note the trend of the last year - programs based on human interaction with virtual reality. Experts associate the popularity of the topic with the sensational game Pokemon Go. This useful experience of working with alternative reality is planned to be adopted and used in the creation of virtual tours of museums, for example, the Hermitage.

On the final day of the hackathon, the results will be summed up. The winners will receive cash prizes in the amount of one hundred thousand rubles. They can be spent on the further development of your project. Other participants will get a unique experience and, possibly, fateful acquaintances.

Photos - group "Hackathon in Vkontakte"/https://vk.com, group "JourHack. 1st hackathon in data journalism in St. Petersburg"/https://vk.com.

The word "hackathon" was formed from the merger of the words "hacking" and "marathon". By hacking, of course, they mean not computer scammers, but IT technology lovers who find pleasure in research and the search for extraordinary solutions.

The first in the world took place in 1999. It was done by the developers OpenBSD OS in Calgary (Canada).

A group of researchers gathered there, who had to solve a difficult task: to find a legitimate bypass for the restrictions imposed by the United States on the export of cryptographic products from the country. They called the event a "hackathon", and colleagues immediately liked the term.

10 days later at the conference JavaOne company Sun Microsystems held a similar meeting, where she suggested that developers create a Java program for Palm V for data exchange between the gadget and the Internet via infrared.

Focus on success, a pleasant friendly format, simultaneous communication and competitiveness - all this made the new type of events attractive to participants and investors. So hackathons got a start in life.

Why do businesses need hackathons?

In 2016, according to hackaton.com, there were 3450 hackathons in the world. The United States currently tops the list with 1,568 events per year, followed by the UK (470 hackathons), Canada (230), Germany (223), France (196). A wide variety of specialists took part in them: developers for the web (36%), mobile systems (36%), hardware platforms (15%), robotic systems and AI (8%).

Russia is not on this list. Because, according to this source, only… one event was held in Russia in 2016.

Of course, this data is invalid. They only reflect the fact that the hackathon as a format for the development of an innovative economy is still growing in Russia. And even though the world still knows very little about hackathons in our country, the real state of affairs is much better than Western statistics.

So, according to the IT-dominanta portal, every month in 2016, 8-10 different events of this type were held in Russia. And only in April 2017, 19 major hackathons were held.

Perhaps hackathons would remain a phenomenon local importance, if large companies, investors, and "angels" did not pay attention to them. They assessed the potential for growth.

Instead of the tedious approvals and refinements that one has to deal with on conventional projects, hackathons have offered a new format for prototyping at minimal cost. Within a few days, the organizers receive several solutions to the technological problem that they face at once.

On the other hand, companies are attractive: here you can not only meet strong developers, but also immediately test them in action. Finally, an important advantage of hackathons is networking with potential partners and promoting your own business.

What is the interest of the participants?

According to hackaton.com, professionals (42.8%), students (21.1%), "amateurs" (18.9%), entrepreneurs (9.6%), as well as those who who are looking for work (7.6%).

The theme of the hackathon is announced immediately, but the goals are not always announced, which adds mystery to the future event and attracts especially adventurous participants. This is done in order not to interfere with the birth of the result right before our eyes. "Miracles" can happen with the prize fund.

So, at the final stage of the Design Hackathon, which was held in Moscow at the end of July 2016 by Sberbank Technologies, the initial prize fund was announced in the amount of 200 thousand rubles. However, the results of the hackathon impressed the organizers so much that the prize fund was increased to 500,000 rubles.

The winner then was the Dream Team. She proposed a "smart voluntary health insurance solution" based on DNA test data. Experience, knowledge and initiative allowed us to achieve excellent results.

As experience shows, participants, in addition to the declared prizes, are interested in several points in hackathons:

Job Opportunity in leading Internet companies and the prospect of meeting the “necessary” in professional development people.
Checking the strength of the development team in a non-standard situation: time is limited, adrenaline is on the limit, the competitive spirit haunts.
academic interest. As a rule, in this case we are talking about teams that work independently, that is, they do not seek employment from the organizers. They are interested in testing the hypotheses that they have born to solve a particular software problem.

Hackathon rules of conduct

At first glance, becoming a winner is quite simple, but many fall for mistakes that cannot be made.

Mistake 1. Failure to comply with the ratio of speed and quality of project development

Many participants try to complete the project as quickly as possible, without taking into account that the most important thing for the jury is the result. Mistakes during hackathons are inevitable and should not be feared. But the idea that will be shown to the jury must be worked out in detail.

Mistake 2. Inability to work in a team

This is especially evident just in situations where you need to quickly get the result. At the hackathon, there is no time for long arguments, you need to be able to competently distribute roles and make compromise decisions.

Mistake 3. Forget about real goals

And perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the solution that the team proposes must have a real practical use. As we remember, business is interested in working ideas that the company will be able to implement tomorrow and get the desired result.

What will happen next?

If hackathons had no plans, then there would be no point in talking about them.

Topic shift. Five years ago, almost all hackathons were held to develop mobile applications. However, already last year, the topic of hackathons shifted towards the creation of systems related to artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Without any doubt, these topics will become top topics for future hackathons.
Intracorporate events. Today, the main trend for large companies is the emphasis on innovation and the development of creative connections within companies. Conducting intra-corporate hackathons allows you to form temporary teams within companies and gather people with different expertise into such projects.

Hackathon(English hackathon, from hack (see hacker) and marathon - marathon) is a developer forum during which specialists from different areas of software development (programmers, designers, managers) work together to solve a problem. Today, hackathons are no longer hacking, they are just programming marathons. Usually hackathons last from one day to a week.

Some hackathons are designed for educational or social purposes, but more often the goal of a hackathon is to create full-fledged software. Each hackathon focuses on a specific area, such as programming language, operating system, application, programming interface (API).

How are hackathons going?

Typically, hackathons begin with a presentation of the event as a whole and specific topics, if they are. Participants then propose ideas and form teams based on interests and skills. After that, work on projects begins directly, which can take from several hours to several days. Eating at hackathons (especially those that last more than 24 hours) is spontaneous, and as a rule, participants eat food like pizza and energy drinks. Also, participants can sleep during the hackathon if they find where.

Hackathons end with project presentations, during which each team shares the results of their work. Sometimes hackathons are competitive in nature. In such cases, the jury evaluates the participants and selects the winners, who are awarded prizes.

Why are hackathons needed?

Hackathons are a good opportunity for designers, developers, and other professionals to get together and work on a project.

Acquaintance. A hackathon is a meeting place for designers, developers and other professionals, where they can get to know each other, exchange knowledge and ideas, or come up with a joint project that they will work on in the future.
Community building. Hackathons help build networks of talented and active people interested in a topic or issue.
Creative workflow and collaboration. At the hackathon, participants have a unique opportunity to work in a free, convenient format for them, with specialists from those areas with which they may never have crossed paths.
New knowledge. The hackathon format assumes that participants are constantly faced with challenges that they have not faced before. Accordingly, learning new things at hackathons is very fast, and the knowledge gained can be immediately put into practice. In addition, there are many people around who can help. For example, a person nearby can explain something in 10 minutes that would require watching an entire video course.
Show of talent. For participants, a hackathon is an opportunity to show how good they are.
Implementation of new ideas. Being a kind of platform for experiments, the hackathon allows you to come up with and implement completely new ideas and projects.
Startup projects scene. For companies, hackathons can be especially interesting because they are a stage for potentially successful startups with which to continue working.

If you decide to organize a hackathon

Hosting a hackathon related to your social mission is good way attract talented specialists to it, come up with and implement new ways to solve existing problems. If you decide to organize a hackathon, then these tips can help you.

Determine the purpose of the hackathon. What problems are you trying to solve? What should developers do? Involving developers is the key to a successful hackathon, as they are the ones who know how to build applications. Experts from the field, people from the community, students should also be involved - the larger the audience, the more creative solutions can be.
Leave plenty of time for planning. Depending on the scale of the event, preparation usually takes three to six weeks.
Choose a venue and date. For obvious reasons, nothing can happen until you choose exactly where it will happen. There are many places where you can host a hackathon, from the offices of IT corporations to local cafes. Since most specialists are working professionals, weekends are more convenient for them.
Attract sponsors. The most expensive elements of a hackathon are the platform, food and prizes. Think about what and to which sponsors you can offer in exchange for support.
Tell potential participants about the hackathon. Post information about the event on relevant resources in order to attract those who are intended and who may be interested in the hackathon. Reach out to the press and community influencers who can spread the word through social media. Ask sponsors to spread the word as well - it's in their interest to have the widest possible audience.
Order (slightly) more food. Ordering too much food and watching it go to waste is sad. But nothing compares to that failure if there is not enough food and the participants are angry and hungry. The same rule applies to the second important aspect of the hackathon - coffee.
Make sure you have good prizes for the winners. As a rule, there is a direct relationship between the quality of the prizes and the quality of the projects.
Remember that no matter how carefully you prepare, something can always go wrong. It is necessary to understand what is critical and what is not, and try to prevent the latter from happening (it will not be critical that a cloudy liquid is poured out of the coffee maker instead of coffee, but that Wi-Fi has stopped working or there are not enough outlets).

In general, the organization of a hackathon is not a very complicated process, and the result of each such event is the emergence of new ideas and projects that have the potential to be socially significant and useful to society.

Organization

Hackathon structure in terms of projects and teams:

Developers at the Hackathon register either as teams or individually.
In the second case, the task of the organizers is to form a team from individual participants.
Depending on the hackathon criteria, you can set requirements for teams - the minimum number, the presence of technical specializations in certain areas, etc.
Participants who do not make it to any team will be very upset.

Idea presentations– regardless of whether they register with you in teams or individually, projects must be submitted at the beginning of hackathons.

This accomplishes several of the following goals:

Formation of teams (if not formed)
Meeting teams with competitors
Acquaintance of the jury and organizers with the projects
Acquaintance of participants with their own projects.

Presentations of ideas from people who will not take part in the hackathon do not make any sense. The project leader has to be with the team all the time, harassing and brainwashing them. Otherwise, the project will fail.

The ideal team size for general / business hackathons is 4-7 people with different specializations. For hackathons with a technical direction - at least 2. It is not desirable for someone to do projects alone, such projects sometimes even win, but they do not have the spirit of hackathons.

Date, duration and entrance

Hackathons last from 1 to 3 days. For a large hackathon, the optimal duration is 48 hours, starting on Friday evening, ending on Sunday evening. Paid entry. It all depends on your capabilities and concept. We recommend that you make the entrance paid (with an underline on the pre-registration) as this will work as a filter for the "left" people, and will also give additional motivation to the participants not to forget to come. Also, with successful PR, registrations can significantly cover your expenses and provide exactly the cash that is difficult to get from sponsors.

Organizers

Obviously, the team is the most important component of anything.

Leading. This is a person who sets the tone and mood of the event, ensures that everything happens according to the schedule, announces the stages, participants and other important information. It is necessary that the presenter be as neutral as possible and not openly sympathize with any of the participants, and even more so, do not “oppress” those who do not succeed. The task of the presenter is to maintain the mood of the event, and therefore it is he who must fill in all the technical moments, hitches between presentations and other fake-ups. At the same time, the presenter is the least important person on the stage and his function is to raise the importance of everyone else. Requirements for the presenter: the ability to speak publicly, knowledge of the subject area, authority among the participants. The facilitator can also be a judge or a mentor, although this is not desirable in my opinion.
Event secretary. The person who deals with the schedule, mentors, sponsors, presenter knows when someone has a pitch, what and when the presenter should say. Often it can broadcast online, post photos on social networks.
Technical Specialist. A person who knows how the network works for events and where to connect it is good when he set it up. Also, often the participants (despite the fact that they are programmers) have problems that they cannot solve on their own - the computer does not connect to the network, it took off operating system, no flash drive. It's good to have someone to take care of them. It's also good when the administrator can take care of the proper operation of microphones, sound, video streams, interactive feed and other things that make your stay at the hackathon better. If you are holding a Hackathon in Moscow and you need good sound, you should take care of renting speakers in Moscow in advance. Don't forget that with regard to the technical infrastructure of events, Murphy's law always works well: If something can happen, then it will definitely happen.
Help volume. The people who provide all the logistics of the event make sure that there is coffee and the toilet is not clogged. Satisfying the needs of participants, finding and retrieving found things (for example, laptop chargers that participants forgot to take with them), do the impossible. Someone from the team must be present at the events all the time, day and night. These people should be known (the leader's task is to introduce everyone to them) and easily identified by T-shirts, badges, etc.

Rule of five "no"

“You can’t” run a hackathon on your own

That is, you can, of course, but if you do not want this to be the first and last hackathon in your company, then you should contact those who have experience in holding such events. Organizing a hackathon is a complex process that involves working with participants, teaching them the art of presenting their own ideas, preparing speeches. It will be necessary to deal with logistics, catering, and the purchase of the necessary stationery.

We hold our hackathons together with our old friends – Mikhail Kechinov Studio, which organizes a series of HackDay events. It is clear that it is necessary to lay a certain budget for this, but the quality of the event will definitely increase. You can read about their view on the process of organizing external hackathons here. You need to pay attention to any, even important, little things, because you will have only one chance to make the hackathon incendiary, memorable, and, most importantly, useful for employees. And if the first pancake is lumpy, then no one will come to you the second time.

“You can’t” motivate employees with expensive prizes

A hackathon is not a competition. It's not about luring specialists from project to project, but about the possibility of cooperation between participants from different teams. The more engineers communicate while working on joint projects, the more more favorable climate on the site, and therefore in the working groups after the hackathon. Therefore, not personalized, but team prizes are important. They should be inexpensive, but definitely aimed at team fun: multi-level complex puzzles, million-dollar puzzles, chess, radio-controlled toys and all sorts of cute things that are designed for the team. No expensive devices should be the bait to participate in the hackathon; if a person counts on it, he is not for you.

The role of the right motivation, as well as the marketing of the hackathon itself, is so great that, perhaps, this is the main thing to think about from the very beginning. How to attract people? With a properly built “promotion” chain, everything will benefit the cause: creative advertising banners pasted everywhere in the office; and a "warm up" warm-up event, which is usually held 1-2 weeks before the hackathon.

An example is the idea of Andrey Pakhomov, head of the development team at the EMC Research Center in Skolkovo. He proposed to make a "lightweight" system for the collaboration of scientific communities. Here is how he describes it himself: “We were solving the problem of managing, storing and exchanging scientific data. The architecture is based on popular and reliable OSS solutions. Thanks to their use, our functionality represents a fairly small level of control, potentially scalable to any need. In principle, the system can be used not only for scientific projects, but also for any tasks that require data management, including search and analytics.” This idea was born during an innovation manifesto and turned into a working prototype at the next hackathon.

But this does not mean that things do not go beyond the hackathon. We invite employees to contribute their ideas to the annual corporate Innovation Roadmap, an internal competition program to collect innovative ideas. And here they are no longer foggy projectors, but well-thought-out prototypes that have gone through the fire-water-and-copper pipes of the hackathon, so that the hackathon helps someone become a winner also at the corporate level. This is the second type of motivation in our company. And, of course, there is a third reason why employees come to the hackathon - it's a fun.

"Don't" underestimate comfort

Hackathon is a long and continuous event. Usually their duration is 48 hours, and for the second year we have been doing 35-hour hackathons (Friday-Saturday). For the comfort of the participants, it is not enough just comfortable bean bags, you need full-fledged sleeping bags, and more comfortable and bigger. We also learned this truth from our own experience.

Don't Forget Expert Feedback

Why do employees come to an internal hackathon? Work out your ideas. Have some fun. And, most importantly, get feedback on the submitted prototypes. Do not limit participants in the "kinds" of ideas. These can be both tasks that teams or customers need to solve today, as well as ideas that lie outside your business.

Everything is also important here: from the nomination of the jury to the organization of mandatory personal feedback from each jury member for each project! The role of the moderator of the discussion during the jury meeting is also important, which should ensure that all valuable comments are voiced and not a single project is ignored.

The composition of the jury should be diverse, it should include representatives of various departments, not only engineering, but also business, sales, and development. Feedback should be versatile.

And the last thing: it is “impossible” to assume that there is no life after the hackathon

Quite the contrary: the success of the prototypes developed during the hackathon largely depends on the further implementation of the projects, on how much you can help the participants show their project to the right people in the company, whether the project will receive investments for further development, or the results of the work can be implemented into the product. . Of course, there will be further patent applications, and the incubation of ideas, and attraction of investments within the company, but this is a completely different story.

How to win hackathons: 5 rules

1. Prepare carefully

Preparation for a hackathon starts from the moment you learn about it. It is important to clarify what from the "inventory" will be provided by the organizers, and what you can and should bring with you.

Consider bringing along a few friends with different technologies that could help the team. Be sure to study the topic of the hackathon and immediately sketch out ideas that you can try to implement during the event. And at the event itself, having understood the situation, you can finally approve the idea and the team. Do not forget to take a laptop, charge your phone, take all kinds of adapters and a 3G modem - Wi-Fi router. As practice has shown, it will not be superfluous.

2. Get the Jury Interested Before Evaluation Starts

As a rule, hackathons are organized by a group of sponsors who are interested in getting a dozen commercial and technical ideas in a particular line of business. They also sit on the jury. If this is not given in the conditions, specify which technologies will be required to be used, which ones are optional. You can try to involve jury members as mentors to draw their attention to the team and your development.

Try to ask as many questions about the case as possible, this will show that you are deeply immersed in their technology or subject area. Sometimes, during the development of an idea, it is possible to find and show bugs in the technologies used by sponsors or find new applications for them. All this will also be additional points in your favor.

3. Focus on your Big Idea without over-engineering the technical details

The technical component can captivate you so much that you will spend all the allotted time debugging a small fragment of the program. In this case, perfectionism can be to your detriment. In a matter of minutes of presentation, no one will have time to understand how carefully you have written your code, and it can take all the time and effort allotted for preparation. Try not to delve into the implementation if you are not sure that you will have time to finish everything by the end. The main thing is the concept of the idea. And so that it solves the goals of the end customer of the hackathon as best as possible. And you can refine the rest of the ideas later, in a more relaxed mode.

4. Presentation of an idea is 30% of success

Often the presenter from the team is the author of the idea or the one who writes the best code, or everyone is given the floor so that no one is offended. This approach doesn't work. Choose from your team the most charismatic member who has at least minimal experience public speaking. If no one has experience, choose the most "speaking" participant and let him prepare using the videos of public speaking trainers available on YouTube. Preparing your presentation is as much a part of the project as writing the right code.

Hackathon is a place of freedom and inspiration. Tune in to a wave of creative atmosphere, new acquaintances and knowledge sharing. Enjoy the process and you'll be fine!

Hackathon is an event where a team of developers, during a limited time and in a small space, breaking into groups, solve a particular problem by creating a software (engineering) solution, product or service.

In my understanding, a hackathon is an entertainment for programmers, which allows you to realize some of your goals in a short time.

Developer Goals:

have fun
Try some technologies, practices
Test a hypothesis / idea in a short time
Do something you've always wanted to do
Check people, team, try to work together
Pitch an existing project, gain experience, feedback, investments
Do something useful
Get material benefits from participation in the hackathon

I have arranged these goals in the order in which I perceive them as a developer and hackathon participant. People are different and their priorities are very different.

There are also different Hackathons.

hackathon criteria

Thematic / general
Competition / fan
Focus on manufacturability of solutions vs business orientation

Based on these (and many other) criteria, both the hackathon and the audience that will come to it will differ.
It is very important that the representation of the organizers and the audience in this place coincide.

Thematic hackathon clearly outlines a certain area in which the problem will be solved and (or) a set of technologies by which these problems will be solved.

Topic examples:

electronic control,
charity,
energy independence,
restaurant industry,
mind map tools,
mobile games.

Technology set usually determined if the event is held on the initiative or under the auspices of a representative of these technologies (company or community)
For example: Hardware hackathon on intel Galileo, photo hackathon by Nikon, Nvidia-CUDA, Unity 3d, ruby on rails in real world, etc.

General Hackathons do not define a clear subject of projects, and are differentiated by individual parameters.

The more clearly you outline the topic, the closer the audience will come to it, but at the same time it will be smaller. If a hackathon does not have significant differentiation, no one may come to it.

Polarity competition / fan comes primarily from the position of the organizers, and the theme.
For example, a hackathon on the topic "Most useless thing in a world" will have a small component of the competition.

The most important factor for this criterion is also availability and size of the prize fund. The more and more actively it is announced, the more the atmosphere of race and tension will be present at the event.

Manufacturability vs Business Orientation these are, first of all, criteria for evaluating decisions made at hackathons.

It also comes from the essence of the organizers and the theme, and is perhaps the most important thing that must be constantly conveyed to the participants, otherwise they can be very disappointed from the inadequacy of the assessment.

* Programmers are always technologically oriented.

Criteria for evaluating a solution in terms of manufacturability:

Technical excellence and functionality
Complexity of implementation, technologies and approaches used
Design, visual perfection of the product

Criteria for the business component:

Having a business model, understanding where the money will come from and how to return it.
The structure and quality of the presentation, communication to the audience, pitching, an idea of the project's marketing strategy.
A team is a group of people who can systematically implement solutions.

Accordingly, the team that developed the super-technological and difficult decision will be disappointed by the victory of a team with a beautiful presentation and a pitcher with a hanging tongue. To avoid disappointment, you need to clearly articulate the goals and criteria of the event.

Also, a mandatory criterion for evaluation should be general excellence and capacity proposed solution. It should work.
If this is not taken into account, then the hackathon turns into a contest of beautiful ideas.

Despite the fact that the above criteria are polar, they can and should be combined. This is the difficulty and the main challenge when creating the concept of hackathons.

Therefore, the first question that the organizer should ask himself is:

The reason, theme and purpose of his hackathons?

You need to understand that you are gathering a bunch of usually professional and expensive people in terms of wages, so that they devote their personal time to solving the problem that you ask with your topic.

Programmers like to do cool, important, useful things and so that everyone knows about it.

Your topic should be simple and clear.

Expectations from products developed at the hackathon

99.7% of startups fail.
99.9% of the solutions developed at the hackathon are thrown away. And it is right.

A hackathon solution is a quick and dirty attempt to check the feasibility of solving a given problem.

Hackathon structure in terms of projects and teams:

Developers at the Hackathon register either as teams or individually.
In the second case, the task of the organizers is to form a team from individual participants.
Depending on the hackathon criteria, you can set requirements for teams - the minimum number, the presence of technical specializations in certain areas, etc.
Participants who do not make it to any team will be very upset.

Idea presentations- regardless of whether they register with you in teams or individually, projects must be submitted at the beginning of hackathons.
This accomplishes several of the following goals:

Formation of teams (if not formed)
Meeting teams with competitors
Acquaintance of the jury and organizers with the projects
Acquaintance of participants with their own projects.

Ideal Team Size for general / business hackathons 4-7 people with different specializations.

For hackathons with a technical direction - at least 2.

It is not desirable for someone to do projects alone, such projects sometimes even win, but they do not have the spirit of hackathons.

Date and duration

Hackathons last from 1 to 3 days.

For a large hackathon, the optimal duration is 48 hours, starting on Friday evening, ending on Sunday evening.

Internet

Good internet is critical for running hackathons. The recommended calculation of the external Internet channel is 1Mbit * 1 participant.
It is highly desirable to have a backup channel that can be connected in the event of a malfunction of the main one.

wifi network- with a large amount of equipment (laptops, accessories), a wifi channel that works satisfactorily under normal conditions may not be able to cope with the activity of hackathons.

Organizers

Obviously - the team is the most important component of anything.

Leading

This is the person who sets the tone and mood of the event, ensures that everything goes according to schedule, announces stages, participants and other important information.

It is necessary that the presenter be as neutral as possible and not openly sympathize with any of the participants, and even more so, do not “oppress” those who do not succeed.

The task of the presenter is to maintain the mood of the event and therefore it is he who must fill in all the technical moments, hitches between presentations and other fake-ups. At the same time, the presenter is the least important person on the stage and his function is to raise the importance of everyone else.

Requirements for the presenter: the ability to speak publicly, knowledge of the subject area, authority among the participants.

The facilitator can also be a judge or a mentor, although this is not desirable in my opinion.

Event Secretary

The person who deals with the schedule, mentors, sponsors, presenter knows when someone has a pitch, what and when the presenter should say. Often it can broadcast online, post photos on social networks.

Technical Specialist

A person who knows how the network works for events and where to connect it is good when he set it up. Also often the participants (even though they are programmers) problems arise that they cannot solve on their own - the computer does not connect to the network, the operating system has taken off, there is no flash drive. It's good to have someone to take care of them.

It's also good when the administrator can take care of the proper operation of microphones, sound, video streams, interactive feed and other things that make your stay at the hackathon better. If you are hosting a Hackathon and you need good sound, you should take care of renting speakers in advance. We advise you to contact only professionals.

Don't forget that Murphy's law always works well for the technical infrastructure of events: If something can happen, it will definitely happen.

Help volume

The people who provide all the logistics of the event make sure that there is coffee and the toilet is not clogged. Satisfying the needs of participants, finding and retrieving found things (for example, laptop chargers that participants forgot to take with them), do the impossible.

Someone from the team must be present at the events all the time, day and night. These people should be known (the leader's task is to introduce everyone to them) and easily identified by T-shirts, badges, etc.

Paid entrance

It all depends on your capabilities and concept.

In general, I recommend that you make the entrance paid (with an underline on pre-registration) as this will work as a filter for "left" people, and will also give additional motivation to the participants not to forget to come.

Also, with successful PR, registrations can significantly cover your expenses and provide exactly the cash that is difficult to get from sponsors.

Work after hackathons

This point is very often forgotten, although it is no less important than the work before the event.

It is necessary to sum up the results, post photos, announce the winners online and what awaits them, thank the partners again. Working after hackathons is a direct investment in your image and in the next event. Don't forget about it!

Keywords: Speaker rental, Hackathon, goals, programmers, software development, projects, Design, business