(THIS DOCUMENT IS A WORK IN PROGRESS! I AM CURRENTLY MAKING THIS DRAFT IN THE OPEN SO WE CAN GET FEEDBACK FROM THE COMMUNITY & SO LEADERS ARE ABLE TO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS README)
Hey, Thomas here! Welcome to the behind-the-scenes of the first Hack Club Hackathon for Club Leaders. It took place over the weekend of February 9th - 11th 2024 in San Francisco.
The goal of this repository is to be a reference for the next person organizing a leader-focused hackathon. No hackathon is the same but we hope that within this repository you can find inspiration for you own special event.
I started my club a bit over a year ago. In some ways, leading a Hack Club felt like an island. I really loved leading my club, but I did not know anyone else who led a Hack Club. I felt a bit isolated. I led my club, and a bunch of other club leaders led their own clubs, but we were all separated by what felt like an ocean, until one day I saw a message from Dev!
My first reaction "wow this is amazing! I would love to go, but there's no way I can make this happen." I lived in South Carolina, and this event was being hosted in Delhi! I then went on a walk with my dog Bodhi, and I begin to think "hmm... maybe this is possible". Hack Club offered flight stipends, and after some googling I found that if everything aligns perfectly, then I MIGHT be able to get my passport & visa in time.
I decided to go for it. I somehow made it happen, and had the greatest adventure of my life! I met people who today I consider some of my closest friends: Sam, Nila, Fayd, Dev, Arpan, etc, built an awesome project, and got to experience a new part of the world! I came back to my club really excited with tons of new ideas for my club.
For The Summit, I wanted to bake into the social contract that club leaders get to go on wild adventures like this. That idea led to this great experiment that you experienced as The Summit: 50 club leaders from around the world gathering to build projects with each other, become best friends, and explore a new part of the world (San Francisco).
Dev & I had a meet at the cafe across the street from HQ. I wanted to make the invitation to club leaders feels incredibly special and valuable. He had the idea of scrolls, and he said he knew a guy who made scrolls in India.
That idea spawned a bunch of design iterations until we landed on this design:
We ordered hundreds of these and mailed them out to every club leader in the world! Club leaders quickly started sharing images of their scrolls in the slack:
Over 50 Club leaders from around the world came to The Summit! Check out the map below to see the different clubs that came to The Summit & see who they collaborated with:
We offered flight stipends to make it possible for these club leaders to come to San Francisco on this great adventure. We had $500 stipends for domestic, Canadian, and European flights (the cost of the flight was typically under $500, so the stipend almost always covered the whole cost of the flight), and we offered $1,000 stipends to those traveling internationally.
6PM Doors Open
Event Countdown: Harp & Violin players, Appetizers, attendees start socializing
Opening Ceremony: Attendees gather in the main area, concept behind the event is made explicitly clear, and we bring hype to the room with a speech from Zach.
Ice Breaker: Attendees found other attendees who had the same badge. They then pitched wacky products with their randomly-assigned teams
Dinner: Korean Food from Donwoori
Announcement Of Prompt: "Build something magical to bring back to your club"
Team Formation: We asked the club leaders to form teams of 3-4 people in 2 minutes.
Design Inspo Scrolls: We then had a basket of scrolls and asked each team to come and take a scroll. Each scroll has a source of design inspiration inside.
Basket Ball Game: Attendees organized a basket ball game
Midnight Milkshakes by Sam: Sam made milkshakes for everyone!
6AM Bike Ride To Golden Gate Bridge: 50 Hack Clubbers went on bikes to the golden gate bridge!
3:30PM Vision Pro Demo: Conrad Kramer brought his Vision Pro and let Hack Clubbers try the headset
4:30PM Tom Preston-Werner Visits The Summit & meets Club Leaders
6:30PM Round Table Dinner Discussion With Club Leaders hosted by Peter
12AM-3AM Intense Push To Finish Projects
3AM Karaoke
1PM Demos
2:30 PM Closing Ceremony & Prizes
3:00 Go have lunch with your team (& every leader receives $20 in cash)
Projects ranged from r/place for clubs, a data visualization of the whole slack, a club inventory system to give members achievements for coming to meetings, an orpheus tomagochi home screen widget, a screaming fish that detects when the rooms gets too loud, and an app to help club members meet other members with similar interests.
Below is an opportunity for leaders to make a PR to this readMe and add in their ships!
Vivian, Acon, and I made most of the designs for The Summit!
Website (Fayd wrote the code to implement the figma design) Figma
We visited various print shops in SF and Ivoine tried on all of the hoodies. We went with the highest quality material. The logo on the front was embroidered.
The material was by Independent Trading Company. We're quite satisfied with the quality of the hoodie material. The print shop messed up the print on the back for many hoodies leading to bleeding of the back design.
Here's a link to the Summit Lofi Animation
Vivian made this awesome Orpheus Summit Lofi Animation!
A few days before the summit, Dieter created a countdown. Originally, he thought about using stock footage from Pexels or some website online but realized that I had brought my old Sony handcam, and thought there was no better way to create a countdown besides filming the team and exploring the city. An hour of footage is like 100MB, which worked out perfect for creating an hour countdown! Check it out; it's unlisted on Hack Club's YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3OUS5VbgnM
We made batches for every attendee and laser etched them into wood!
We had 15 different variants and used the variants to group people together for an ice breaker activity.
These were our budget estimations
| Item | Cost | Quantity | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Travel Stipends (US and Canada) | 400 | 50 | 20000 |
| Travel Stipends for International Superleaders | 1000 | 5 | 5000 |
| Event Meals | 18 | 250 | 4500 |
| Friday Dinner | 25 | 50 | 1250 |
| T-Shirt, Stickers, & Badge | 20 | 70 | 1400 |
| Supplies | 15 | 50 | 750 |
| Venue Maintainence / Security / Misc | 3000 | 1 | 3000 |
| Invite Letter to Leaders | 3.25 | 600 | 1950 |
| Transportation | 30 | 65 | 1950 |
| Reserve for Emergency Use | 5000 | 1 | 5000 |
| Lunar New Year Meal | 15 | 50 | 750 |
| Total | 45550 |
We're still in the process the actual cost distribution of the event.
Schedule Generously Everything you as an organizer schedule for will take twice as long as you imagine. If you imagine a bike ride to the Golden Gate Bridge will take two hours, it will actually take four. It's important to make generous time estimates to ensure things don't get off schedule. Something we could have done much better is making a run of show that gave enough time to the various shenanigans that took place.
People Look To You People look to organizers to see what they should be doing. If organizers are preparing for the next big activity, then attendees will start preparing for the next big activity. If organizers are working on building a project, then attendees will work on building a project. Saturday afternoon, Dev and I were pretty concerned with the fact that it seems like many teams were not close to finishing their projects. This put us in crunch mode and we had the idea that we should give people a "3 hour push" to do everything they can to progress their projects. During this time, Dev, Max, and I started working on a Slack Bot called Slackapolt that catapults people into specific slack channels (for club leaders to invite their members).
Find A Team That Complements Your Strengths & Weaknesses Working The Summit organizing team was incredible. Even when things were not going super well from an organizer point of view and we were having trouble figuring out how to fit things into the schedule, Brianna was incredibly calm and solution-minded. When suddenly we needed to get prizes, Fayd and Ivoine stepped up and went to get them asap. When I was working out details of the schedule, Dev was finding local harp plays to make the first entrance feel magical. Dev has this skill of finding ways to put money toward things that most people would not think of that provide disproportionate value. If you're going to organize something great, it's incredibly important to have an organizing team you can rely on.
There are more lessons that as they come to mind, I'll add them to this document.