Rolling your own Hackathon

Question

Background Info

Hey, I pitched the idea of a company Hackathon that would donate our time to a charity to work on a project (for free) to improve morale in my company and increase developer cohesion. As it turns out most like the idea but, guess who's gonna be the one to put it together. lol Yeah me.

I should add that we are a fairly small shop with about 10-12 programmers (some pull double duty as programmers, inters etc..) So, that might make things a bit easier.

Base Question

While I am no means a project manager or of any level of authority (Entry level guy) I was wondering if anyone knew the best approach for someone in my position to put together such an even with possibly (some) company backing. Or for that matter have any helpful advice to pass along to a young padawan.

So far.....

As of right now it is just an idea so, to start with I presumably would have to put together some sort of proposal and do some that office stuff that I became a programmer to steer clear of to some extent.

Answer 1

Start Small and Work Up

This is a great idea both for your company for the reasons stated and for yourself as a learning/growing experience. When you can pull off a project like this well, you'll be ready to move up to a job with more responsibility and you'll have successes on your resume to justify the move.

Two caveats to watch out for:

1. It's probably going to be harder than you think. Coordinating software development projects well has surprisingly little to do with writing good code. It's a new skillset, and not a trivial one to learn. Don't take on a hard project as your first 'team lead' experience, much in the same way that you wouldn't write a really complex application for your first program.
2. Watch out for management to be concerned that you are overtaxing company resources or distracting employees from their day job. It's pretty easy to have something like this boomerang on you to be perceived as a negative. A great way to deal with this is to 'time box' the work so that it's guaranteed to not exceed what management is comfortable with giving. At my workplace, we have a 'Day Of Caring' where every employee is encouraged to take a work day off to do whatever they like at a local charity. It's a great program -- and it's very explicitly limited to one day only.

With this advice, you may want to find a very small project that can be accomplished by 2-3 people in 2-3 days for your first go. If I were you, I would consider doing it informally as a weekend activity with co-workers you have a strong relationship without even discussing it with company management. After you have 1-2 of these very small projects under your belt, you can consider moving up to more formal and larger projects.

One final piece of advice from someone who does a lot of on the side little projects for charities -- consider the 'maintenance' part of your work. Especially if you're going into an organization that has no 'it guy', you're going to find that whatever you do needs some level of maintenance over time. Even something as simple as setting up a free hosted website takes a couple hours a year to update, etc. Once you donate your time to create a project, most charities will assume you've also signed up to maintain it. Think this through before getting yourself over-committed to something you can't maintain.

Answer 2

I would start by contacting some local charities and find out what their needs are. I'd then compile a short list of the company/need and see which one might be the best fit for your company's capabilities.

To help make the effort a collaboration, you could ask team each member to propose a charity and have them do the leg work on that one charity. That way not one person is doing too much grunt work before the coding begins.

PS. This sounds like a great idea. If more companies did this just once a year or two, it would go a very, very long way.

Answer 3

GiveCamp's Hackathon Cookbook

I found this as a potential solution as well. Saves a lot of leg work here.

Give Camp

Let me know what you guys think.

Answer 4

Running an event like this has little to do with coding and mostly to do with planning, and it can be a lot of work. So start with the basics:

• What are your assets?
• Where are you going to do this?
• Who are you going to get to MC/present/speak (anyone)?
• When is it going to happen?
• What do you need?

Once you start thinking about these questions, you'll find that they lead to more questions that need answering. If you're company is donating the location (the office), then you have one less worry. If not, you'll have to call around for places that might be willing to donate space.

Then you have to worry about power, network, etc. If this is going to be a smaller, more informal hackathon, you might be able to get away with a wireless router and a spare desktop for version control/demo server. You will need to be creative for sure.