Create a network of hacky organizers

[loleg]

I'd like to share with you a vision (zoom in and discuss here) of how hackathons fit into the wider scheme of progressive social business/education, and which of our platforms or certain kinds of partnerships are supporting momentum. This is taking shape through a series of workshops - including the recent Hack;Org;X series in May as well as meetings and hackathon reviews. I am hoping it will add 🔥 to the ✊ and help us create better supports for initiatives around our global network.

Source: dribdat/design

[loleg]

We have now had 3 in-person and 3 virtual events in this new series. I think we have identified a number of topics that would ignite more cooperation and best practice sharing among organisers. I have been supporting the implementation of hackathons as part of educational programs, where the interest in networks and shared standards is high. Most recently I participated in a conference for committed organisers & researchers into the topic. The momentum is growing! I think we would all like to see the community of organizers banding together around common pain points, and contributing a bit of time and resources to initiatives that can improve the quality and accessibility and fairness of all hackathons.

The question is, how to go from here. Would it make sense for us to be a Working Group of an existing association, is this a topic that deserves it's own governing body, could we attach ourselves to a research or government unit to help keep the pace, or is it "enough" for this to be just a website, and something for us to look forward on the calendar? I would like to see the next workshop address this.

In the meantime, we might inspire ourselves from yesterday's "Ultimate Hackathon Webinar" looking back on 10 years of Major League Hacking impacts:

I think it's there's been a cyclical nature to it, where in the early days [organizers] were really scrappy, very community-oriented - you know, the sponsors were kind of incidental in a lot of ways, and I think probably five years ago is when they started to reach this level of being well structured, being repeatable, being scalable - having metrics and quantifiable stuff behind it. The pandemic really disrupted a lot of that - all of these habits, structures, expectations got thrown through a loop. Now organizers of both in-person and digital events had to rethink all the different ways ways that their events worked - how do we make this engaging, how do we get people to know about it, how do we make it valuable for sponsors. It feels like now we're in some ways reinventing a lot of how hackathons work. This comes down to the theme, it comes down to the value for attendees, it comes down to the communities around it, it comes down to the prompts - what are the challenges, what are you being asked to work on. It's a cool thing to watch, because every generation of devrel leaders, every generation of community organizers, is putting their own spin on it.

-- Jon Gottfried ~00:15:00 - see also this interview