A great mentor of mine named Costa Nzambara once told me a profound parable from his native Rwanda:
Everyone has something to give.
No matter where you come from, what you do, or how hard life may have been, there is something you can give to your community to improve the wellbeing of both yourself and others. We all have something to give. Some can give money, some can give love, and some can give code.
And by running a nonprofit based in Silicon Valley, I knew that we were swimming in amazing coding talent that was changing the way we live, work, and play. Still, this boon of talent also presents a double edged sword when ramping up a nonprofit or small company. With so much competition out here for the best coders in the world, it’s expensive to hire IT, full-time or part-time, to help your mission grow. So what’s a do-gooder to do?
The predominant answer to this riddle in Silicon Valley is: Stage a hackathon. Its a great way for the tech community to come to a festive event where they can spend a day, weekend, or even week coding for good. Get coders in a room, tell an inspiring story, and then you will get that awesome app or website done in no time, right?
Wrong.
I have hosted and joined in a number of Hackathons at GO, Full Circle Fund, Silicon Valley Tech Connect, and others and learned that without proper preparation, it’s just a waste of everyone’s time. Yet done well, we discovered ways to make Hackathons vastly useful with both short and long term benefits.
9 Steps to make your hackathon a success:
- Have dedicated tech talent at the leadership level: Whether consdering a hackathon or not, every organization will need dedicated IT resources. I always make sure to inspire or hire some amazing tech talent to assist with the detailed logistics of our tech strategy. For smaller organizations, inspire some amazing developers and hackers that will give their support for the long haul by becoming advisors or board members and then gave them full control of how the Hackathons should be managed. Let the technical experts manage the techincal aspects of the hackathon to make sure it goes smoothly.
- Have a clear goal: “Let’s revamp the website!” or “Build me an app!” is not a goal. That’s a pipe-dream that will waste people’s time. I participated in a hackathon with the “site revamp” approach and nearly 50 developers showed up to help. They broke up into various teams and created about 10 different websites for a great charity over a weekend. At the end, none of the sites worked with each other, they were all vastly different in coding styles. Most of the supercifical layers of the new website did not work with the existing back end systems. One year late, none of the websites created that weekend were implemented. At GO Hackathons, we set out tangible goals with clear, specific goals and documented our requirements with Asana. Asana is a free project management tool that is easy to use and free for up to 50 people, it’s great for Hackathons. Documenting what you want to create and how it should work will make you think more about what you would like to create, what problem you are trying to solve, which will then make it clearer to the coder, resulting with a better finished coded product.
- Make It an Experience to Remember: While getting a clear goal is key, you should also leave some things open ended so the coders are also creatively involved in the development process. Let them come up with some answers for the problems to be solved, it makes the hacking process more engaging and fruitful for all parties (see #5 below for more details so things don’t go crazy). The music and location also matters. Come up with rad playlist that keeps people pumping out code at 120 beats per minute (EDM tracks like these playlists here or here or here will do the trick) . At our first Hack at GO, we also streamed Japanese anime (Ghost in the Shell, Akira) on a massive projetor while serving Peruvian appetizers with various premium cocktails (and don’t forget the energy drinks!). The hackathon ended with a communal dinner, served by a Peruvian chef so we could talk like family and share ideas about how to do it better next time.
- Make It Productive: After staging a few hacks, we realized people had a hard time finding the right files to edit and how to access the coding environments of the nonprofit. A lot of time was wasted looking for needles in the WordPress based haystack. As such, at GO, our amazing dedicated volunteers (see #1 above) made it simpler for people to come in, log in, and then code away. Warning: the next chunk gets super technical. First, the venerable and rad GO Champion Michael Klein created this guide for all developers to be able to access our code and database with ease. Second, a board member Brian Shire moved our site hosting to Amazon Web Services and enabled our account to create, on demand, as many instances of our website as we needed for any given hackathon. So if we had 5 developers show up, we could create 5 unique dev environments at a touch of a button. If 20 developers showed up, we could spawn out 20 unique environments. This also saves money since you create and shutdown the dev environments on demand and do not have to permanently manage a vast number of dev environments.
- Enlist Point Guards: Even if people are rocking out, coding out, and have access to all the files they need, they will still have questions. Lots of them. To address them effectively without creating roadblocks, make sure there are enough people acting as point guards to float the room and answer questions. These people should come from #1 as they should know your code, design ethos, and goals very well. Ideally, one point guard for every 5 developers works well. Point guards should do nothing outside floating the room to answers questions and give out amazing high-fives.
- Keep It Small: I’ve attended a hackathon with five people that had amazing progress. I’ve also been at a hack with 60 people where nothing really got done. While there is no ideal number as it really depends on how adequately you prepare, my personal preference is to keep the team small at around four to ten people. You cannot build a good website or make an app in a day as is. By keeping it smaller, you may need more time to finish though if people are inspired and had a good time, they will come back to help out more at future Hackathons. It feels good to give and people like to help. Though if 60 people show up, they find that their work isn’t used or acknowledged, then they will not feel good and will not keep supporting your work. Make it small, make it effective, and repeat.
- Leverage Volunteer Matching: I’ve staged Hackathons at the offices of Adobe, Salesforce, and Google as all of these companies have generous matching policies of volunteer hours for their employees. Which means that if they are volunteering their time to help your site look or work better, as a nonprofit, you could raise money for your mission. Not only does your site or app improve, your mission also gets a bonus check. By the time we had our hackathon machine rolling effectively, we were getting some great site updates while walking out with $500 to $2,500 checks.
- Think Out of the Box: Not every hackathon needs to be about ‘coding a site’. Sometimes you can just inspire some great user experience experts (the people that manage the flow of a website) or designers to help your message look more crisp. Many companies have days dedicated to helping nonprofits and it does not always have to mean coding an app. I once staged a hackathon at Symantec (?) to just talk about the wording on our menus with design experts. They gave their input for an afternoon, designed various ideas for our development team to consider, and then donated $500 to our organization. One even became a repeat donor. Quadruple win.
- Mixing It Together: This is the hardest part and will require the most dedicated volunteers or IT staff to manage. At the end of every great Hack, you end up with some amazing new features on your site. Sometimes dozens of new features. Yet this code all has to work harmoniously together. If 10 volunteers built 10 amazing rooms and none of them fit when put altogether (the doorways don’t align, the windows face walls) then you have achieved jackshit. Ultimately, the point guards will help identify things before this happens though most of this work will happen in the days or weeks after the hack. You will need to inspire a good site architect or have a contractor on demand that will merge all the code together with a tool like BitBucket and ensure that nothing is broken.
The tips above should help make a hackathon a viable resource for your mission to reach new coding and design heights. If you would like more detailed consultation about the nuances of this approach, then please reach me here.
I would also like to thank this amazing group of inspired coders that are shaping a better and more just world. Their input in creating these tips and tricks were absolutely invaluable and I cannot thank them enough for their support.
Kyle Miller (Airbnb)
Michael Klein (Accenture)
Brian Shire (Facebook)
Duane O’Brien (Adobe)
Gardner Bickford (Adobe)
David Demember (Toi)
Annie Davis (World Centric)
Zach Berke (Exygy)
Barclay Keir (Freelance designer extraordinaire)
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