I have an idea.
What if we organized a community hackathon.
“We” being unspecific here, it refers to any community that me and you, the reader, are potentially both members of, depending on who reads this.
Of course, such aren’t entirely unheard of, and maybe not even all that dissimilar from the ones heard of. But what if we really pushed for the general goal of enabling people to do stuff together, especially in the aftermath of the event? Today I happened to come up with an idea to propose a few principles and ideas to organize such an event.
It should not be competitive
- Otherwise, participants try to win with a “selling” presentation
- Otherwise, participants try to win by achieving semblance of a solution by using the machine solution (popular in these trying times) made for producing semblances of broadly understood digital content creation
- Otherwise, participants don’t share what they have until the ultimate judgement time
- Otherwise, highly mainline-engaged participants defaulting to solitary work are discouraged from interacting with others
- Otherwise, it matters which team is favored by mentors. Without the competitiveness, we can have those wanting to take the role of mentors participate normally, just with a little more focus on attending meny teams.
It should not be one-off
People will try to make things right the first time if is a yearly event. They will not take risks, and they will judge themselves for what they come out with. They may try to focus too hard on solitary work.
It should be 10-50 people
Experimentation with organizing such an event should start from small one, allowing on iterative improvement with little resources spent on a single instance.
Focused on local community, so that people feel things have a continuation and the people will be there again and will also be met again in this city, even if not all are from this city.
This way it can also be organized not in a rented venue but at a community place.
It should promote exchange of teammates
It is way better to ditch solitary work halfway through the event or earlier if there are opportunities to collaborate with others on something.
Also, if you succeed in one team maybe you could then get up from that table and get involved with another — managing too many projects you actually stay involved with outside of the event can be left for later. Being hooked on several opportunities, just to already be initiated into being able to contribute to them, may be a good thing to have.
It should make everyone as aware possible of what the other is doing
Broadcast means
Not everyone will be having a lot of conversations happening. Also most won’t end up knowing what every other team is at. However, we want the event to be common group activity to some extent.
Open mic
One mean is to have periodic public speaking encouraged from all participants.
Make it cool to walk out and say you don’t really have anything done, except some attempts that failed because that and that, but can mention some cool work going on somewhere in the room.
Or maybe even an interviewer going around the room with a microphone and asking people to say a word or two without even standing up from their laptop.
Projector adverts
Allow teams to upload mostly anything to fill one-fourth of a screen (entire screen is good too, for technical feasibility and legibility), with content cycled, as long as, by the approval of a moderator, it is either:
- inviting to others to come work with you, or
- if it is informative of your progress or concepts.
Summoning checklist for visibility
Fixed checklist of whether everyone has either put a status update up to the projector or said a few words can be maintained — but it is important to:
- Not have people feel forced to anything
- Not have bringing attention to oneself result (e.g through posting a projector advert) in being compelled to speak by the interviewer
- Probably the checklist could be opt-in so that people can feel they are not being forced to participate in this way just by sitting in the room with a laptop. However, the encouragement to join the list would have to underline that no commitment to actually work on things is required
Every participant is an opportunity to others in some way. They are present and likely have some eagerness to join, have their thing joined, or pair, even if just for a conversation.
Starting the event
Not doing anything special. Everyone will be late and nobody will be late. Instruction for participation should be periodic. Things don’t have to be repeated — except for little peeks to spark curiosity; things can be relayed peer-to-peer by earlier spectators and direct author approaching. This way the event can even start earlier without everyone being able to attend yet. And this way we don’t lose those not able to attend for just two-three hours.
Just, even with the first few people in the room, it’s good if we get them in a “the event is now” mindset and start doing things.
Participant advertisements to arrived attendees gathered before their arrival
Opt-in advertisements about some participants, and their more or less vague ideas on what would they want to collaborate on (perhaps even very specific!) could be requested upfront and put on two sheets of paper to be put on a cork board, as well as projected on the screen intermittently before it gets saturated with the later adverts.
This includes announcing people available for mentoring on getting into contributing to particular open-source projects.
It shouldn’t be a final thing for that cork board, as besides LAN upload of adverts the cork board could allow for post-it notes written with a thick marker, that could even also be periodically photographed and displayed intermittently on the projector.
This post-it notes idea is, for me, tied to how one should spin the participants into action, but could also replace the projector depending on will to prepare projector submission software solution and room arrangements.
Things currently posted on the board can also be read out loud once or twice at some point.
An A4 graphic printer could also be available to participants. Imagine team advertising done ad-hoc in the vicinity of the table — or just plain shitposting performed in physical means, dragging the art expression out of subsets of attendees active in their social media circles, also facilitating interaction.
Concluding the event
Some people will indeed leave early. One could theorize that not concluding the event in any special way would be best as with the start.
But bringing even more focus to what has everyone been doing can be even better. People may be more willing to call the hacking done at that point and focus more on summarizing things to the others, possibly still meeting their last chance of a quick chat and collaborating online later or simply next time.