How to hack a hackathon - Part 2
This is a continuation to Part 1, which you can read here.
Day 1
The participants arrived at 5:30pm. Lindsay and Annelise set up a table at the front and checked people off the registration, gave them personalized name tags and welcomed them to the event. If they had registered but hadn’t paid yet, they were directed to the front desk to pay before entering. We invited special guests from the community for the first night to see the presentations and be involved in the discussions.
I started the event by explaining the history and definition of a hackathon and asked the participants if they’d ever been to one before. Every said this was their first and most told me they weren’t even sure what they’d signed up for. This made me grateful we’d chosen to have Friday night be about education and discussion to help bring everyone up to speed on the problems; we used the night to lay the landscape.
Foundational Knowledge
To begin with, Michael gave a slide presentation about the three stakeholders (community projects, volunteers and coworking spaces) and illustrated in detail the obstacles each of these faced while having volunteers work on community projects. It was definitely a data dump, but we were told later that everyone really appreciated all the information and most went home and studied the slide deck while thinking of initial pitches for solutions.
Community Projects
Next, we had 3 founders of community projects in the area (Stella’s Child, Kunchi, and Merah Putih Hijau) explain their projects, what their immediate needs for volunteers were and their unique obstacles in having volunteers come onboard to help.
Volunteers
Then, we had brief comments from volunteers expressing their perspective on personal time constraints combined with eagerness to help. This met an obstacle when faced with a lack of organization and poor communication from community projects. Most finished with expressions of gratitude that they were able to help in even small ways and hoped there could be an easier way to streamline the whole process for greater impact.
Coworking Space
Finishing the night, Sisie Muthia, who is the head of Hubud’s cogiving initiatives, gave an amazing slide presentation about their efforts to do organized and impactful cogiving projects over the last couple of years.
I wrapped up the night by thanking the speakers for coming down and sharing their valuable information and thanking the participants for giving up a whole weekend to work on this project that we all now understand was very complex. I explained how to access the participant packages on the google drive, how initial pitches and teams were going to be done in the morning, and encouraged everyone to get a good night sleep and be ready for yummy food from our sponsors in the morning.
An hour after concluding, one of the participants (Norbert Dragan) created this live whiteboard from all the data collected friday night. We were blown away by it! Other participants had already formed teams and worked on their pitches until the early morning.
Day 2
Around 8am, participants started to arrive and filter toward the pool, where we had breakfast ready to go for them. Delicious Made’s banana flour waffles and french toast, In the RAW juice, Boostrap cold brew coffee, and 220 Kombucha to start them off right. People were discussing initial pitches, asking us questions and then writing down and turning in their ideas.
I rounded everyone up at 9am and had them come back into the main room to do the pitches. I recapped what we did the night before, explained briefly what we were going to do that day (directing everyone to the schedules again). I asked for a last call of pitches and then explained how they’d be presented.
Then, we dove into the pitching
I randomly numbered the pitches as they were turned in and then called up each one up, starting with number one. They had one minute to explain who they were, which problem they wanted to tackle and their suggested solution. After they were done (or the timer had gone off), I asked if anyone had questions. Then, I took the pitch slip and stuck it on the whiteboard. I reminded people to remember which number they liked so they could vote on it later (otherwise, they would forget their favorites by the time all of them were presented).
We had 13 separate pitches. People smiled and laughed to themselves as they realized how close their pitch was to someone they didn’t know who had just presented. After all of them had presented, Michael and I grouped together the pitches that were basically identical.
We handed out one sticker per person and announced there would be a moment of chaos where everyone was to come up to vote with their sticker on the pitch they wanted to work on. They were allowed to vote for their own pitch. We said a pitch would “survive” the round of voting if it had a minimum of two votes and a cap of 5 votes.
We said “Go”
Participants excitedly voted on the project they wanted to work on. 2 pitches were left with no votes and were ruled out of the hackathon. We had one team that asked if they could have 6 people on their team. Michael and I looked at each other and shrugged, “why not?” We allowed it.
I asked if everyone had found a home on a team; they all smiled and said yes. Everyone was successfully matched up with a project they were excited about. I asked if anyone knew people on their team; most said they didn’t. Great! We were excited to see the collaboration happening around a shared goal.
We asked the teams to name themselves and wrote their team names on the board along with how many people were on each team.
Let’s make this fun
I explained the expectations we had for the weekend. We didn’t care whether the solution was low-tech or high tech; just that it was innovative and viable.
I told the teams the instructions for final pitch decks were in their participant packages, along with the judging criteria and some extra tips. I thanked everyone again for their dedication to the weekend and how excited we were to see what they came up with. I emphasized how this was supposed to be fun and told them to come to Michael or I for any questions/concerns they had. Then, by 10am I set them free to hack.
We had a yummy lunch of banana flour paninis and kombucha. At 3pm, I had the mentors come by and go around asking the teams if they needed help in any way. We hoped the teams would talk through their solutions with the mentors; the mentors could help them with any snags and see if their solutions were real-world ready. I picked the mentors carefully; I wanted representation from the all three stakeholders (volunteers, coworking spaces, and community projects).
Mentors
- Theresa Wong- sustainable impact consultant. (After hearing the discussion on the Friday night, she asked if she could be a participant because she was so excited to work on a solution. She pitched The Sustainables’ idea.)
- Jeroen Van Overbeek- Founder of Social Impakt, who invented long-lasting water filters and whose mission is: “Everyone, everywhere has access to safe and affordable water within their house.
- Salvador Dauvergne- Restaurant professional and technology entrepreneur who has over 20 years in volunteer and business experience
- Sisie Muthia- Head of Hubud coworking space’s Cogiving program
- Sean Nino- Founder of Merah Putih Hijau, a community project that builds recycling infrastructure and a color coded waste separation system. (Nino was actually a judge, but he was so excited to hear what the participants were hacking, that he went around and mentored too.)
- Lindsay Nickel and Annelise Lynch from the organizing team
LESSON LEARNED: Don’t push mentorship on anyone and don’t overwhelm the teams. We asked the mentors to make themselves available to have the teams come grab them when they were needed. This worked well, but sometimes a team got excited and grabbed two mentors at once and then got overwhelmed with all the information. It’s better to have one mentor per group at any given time. And stay out of it as a facilitator as best you can (which is hard!).
Fancy Dinner
The dinner that night was white tablecloth dining with a whole team from a local restaurant (Gypsy) come in and make us a four course meal. We were all completely blown away. Made’s made us their delicious desserts again and people couldn’t be happier.
LESSON LEARNED: I can’t reiterate enough how working with amazing food sponsors make the biggest difference. Where most other hackathons provided pizza, our participants got a four course meal from a 5 star restaurant with locally sourced food. See the difference? It shows we care and the community cares about the hard work they are putting into it.
We ended the dinner around 8pm and told everyone they could keep working or go home and get some sleep. Most stayed until the early hours of Sunday morning.
Day 3
We had another amazing breakfast and then the schedule stated that we would round the teams up for a recap and go over that day’s schedule. But we chose not to do the round up. Participants were so eager to start hacking, they brought their breakfasts to their work area and started working.
LESSON LEARNED: Read the situation and uphold your main goals for the event. Our goal was to help the participants have an experience that flowed as easily as we could organize and to give them as much time to work on their projects as we could. Sunday morning, everything was flowing smoothly and people were working away. So, we left them be.
From 2–4pm we had an optional pitch practice with mentors. The participants could grab a mentor and go over their full presentation. This gave them real life practice and helped smooth out any snags in the flow of their slide presentations.
I walked around and rounded up the slide presentations via USB drive at 4:30pm. Everyone was supposed to bring them to me, but most people forgot what time it was (and some were just squeezing every last drop out). As they turned in their pitches, I directed them to the photographer who took a team photo by the pool.
At 5pm, we had all the groups, mentors, judges and select representations from the community gather in the main hall for the final pitches. We gave each team 10 minutes to present and then answer questions by the judges.
Judges
- Sean Nino- Founder of Merah Putih Hijau
- Tim Cameron- Founder of Stella’s Child; supports Indonesian youths from deeply disadvantaged backgrounds as they prepare to leave children’s homes and orphanages and enter the world of work.
- Wira Wiraguna — Founder of Five Pillar Foundation; engages local Balinese village communities through developing opportunities for community-based tourism, promoting local enterprise, and providing educational workshops for local Balinese village communities.
- Michael Craig- Founder of Dojo Bali coworking space
- David Abraham- Founder of Outpost coworking space
- Steve Munroe- Founder of Hubud coworking space
They rocked it
Everyone did amazing on their presentations. You could tell they worked tremendously hard and put their heart into it.
The internet went out during the second presentation and was cutting in and out throughout the rest of them (completely a fluke, but of course it happened when there were 60 people in the room for the finale). Indonesia was having terrible internet across the board and Michael had been working nonstop to fix it. We worked through it, but it scared us.
LESSON LEARNED: Have the team’s presentations not depend on internet. I planned an hour for presentations; which was an error in scheduling because we had 7 teams and it didn’t include technical difficulties/people running over on time.
We had a break for the judges to deliberate and gave everyone appetizers and drinks. We had hired bartenders serving Bootstrap espresso martinis and rum 220 kombucha cocktails.
Winners
It was such a hard call to make for the winners; there were so many good projects. We ended up calling in all the mentors to help decide because they had worked so closely with the teams. It was a heated debate.
Finally, we came up with a team winner (free month’s coworking pass), a Best Team Lead (brand new surfboard), and a Most Innovative Participant (brand new road bike).
We gathered everyone back into the hall and thanked our sponsors, our mentors, judges and all the participants. We announced the winners: Cam Woodsum won the surfboard for Best Team Lead and Piérre Reimertz won a road bike for Most Innovative Participant. And the winner of the hackathon was… Nomad Pool!
Let’s eat!
Dojo supplied an amazing Australian BBQ and Made’s ended us off with their amazing desserts. The drinks continued to flow all night!
To say we ended the night celebrating and dancing would be an understatement; there was a palatable buzz flowing through everyone.
We all left late Sunday night humming with the ideas that were created, the friendships made and the possibilities of change to be had. Dojo Hackathon was a success!
What I would have done differently
- Given myself more time to plan.
- Had a checklist of what I needed to do. I honestly committed to organize/run this hackathon without really understanding what needed to be done. I spent a lot of time scrambling and trying to figure it out. I ended up wasting a lot of time.
- Acted more confident in my organizing/facilitating skills. This was my first time doing an event this big/extensive and I was very insecure about whether I would do a good job. This invited people to question me, offer suggestions and one person even tried to get me to hire her to take over and facilitate it for me. I would have saved a lot of heartache if I had showed a confident front and then had mentors behind the scenes helping me work through my insecurities.
- Had more team meetings with staff and volunteers. We had complaints from staff after the stress from the weekend. They felt they weren’t looped in on the process enough and didn’t get the chance to ask lingering questions. That left them feeling confused and dumped on. It’s not enough to personally know what’s happening if you’re entire team isn’t onboard as well.
- Understand what will happen after the hackathon. I was so excited and passionate about the idea to hold the hackathon, I naively didn’t plan for what follow up was needed after the hackathon. The winning team asked for help with resources to build out their solution, other participants asked for contact info for the community projects so they could volunteer, and pretty much everyone wanted to know what the next steps were. What were we going to do with this information we learned? How would it get applied? I wasn’t prepared for this and it overwhelmed me. All of this could have gone smoother if I had a post-hackathon plan from the beginning. It shows respect for the hard work the participants put into the weekend to know what’s happening with their solutions. Bottom line: have a next steps plan before you start executing anything.
What you need to get started
- Understand your theme and know how to market it to get the participants you want. We didn’t necessary need programmers, but other people assumed that’s what we wanted for participants and therefore felt unqualified to join. It wasted a lot of time and stress trying to change our marketing halfway through advertising the event.
- The most detailed internal schedule you can create. I can’t emphasis enough how this will come in handy when you have 20 people asking you different organizational questions during the event. Here’s an example of what we started with. This includes everything from where do we set up chairs to when do the food sponsors need to arrive. I held that printed schedule like it was my baby and it never left my side.
- A place to host the event. This goes without saying that you can’t do much if you don’t have a good venue.
- Have a way for people to pay and sign up. Please, for your own sake, pick the most simple route. Eventbrite works best in most countries. This would have saved us so much stress to have this figured out at the beginning.
- Confirmation email with all the details. People want to get excited about the event (and also want to make sure their application went through.)
- Initial pitch info guidelines. Give this to them on Day 1 (or even in the confirmation email) so they can start prepping their initial pitches and ideas. It also helps them feel more prepared for the event and this will make them more excited.
- Final pitch info guidelines, examples and tips.
- Judging Criteria. This is for the judges AND the participants. The participants need to know what they will be judged on and it needs to be given to them in their participant package on Day 1 (or sooner).
- Photographer and videographer. Did it happen if no one saw it? But seriously, this stuff matters more than you know.
- Good judges and mentors. We got really lucky with ours! They understood what we were trying to do and dedicated their weekend to help coach the participants and judge the presentations with great care (and hearty debate).
- Banners, pendants, and name tags on brand. These look amazing in the marketing photos and makes the event feel more professional and special.
- Food Sponsors. Having communicative, reliable and delicious food sponsors was key to making this event a success. People said it’s what made them feel special and taken care of. It also made my life less stressful that we had good food that came on time.
- Good communication with and appreciation for all staff/volunteers involved. This weekend is so hard on everyone. Staff are doing their normal workload, plus all the hackathon extras. Volunteers are dedicating their time/effort this event. Reward their hard work with a small gift or bonus. It might sound like a small thing, but it’s huge for them. And they deserve the appreciation; you couldn’t have pulled it off without them.
- Have next steps outlined and ready to execute. People want and deserve to know what is happening next with all their hard work. Do you have potential sponsors to build out their projects? Follow up mentor sessions? Another hackathon planned to build off what you’ve learned? A way for everyone to keep in touch? These are all suggestions, but please have something lined up. (A facebook group for all the participants to post into and keep in touch with each other is gold. People love sharing and connecting; organize a space to do that for them.)
Learn more about the solutions we created here.
Want to sponsor a solution to be built out? Have any questions? Want me to facilitate your event? Email me at brittneebond@gmail.com.
