Why and How to Host a Hackathon. Wikipedia may be going dark tomorrow, but three days from now the folks who run the non-profit foundation will host a three-day "hackathon" geared toward building entirely new applications running on top of Wikipedia itself, on mobile devices or based on Wikipedia's data and content. If you're a coder, programmer or Internet-based design engineer you can participate.
Free tickets for the three-day event that takes place in San Francisco are now sold out, but you can still participate by way of the Internet. Click here for a link to the hackathon online, where some of the world's greatest computer minds may end up creating new products that the rest of us may be using in just a few months' time. Related: What You Can Learn About Innovation from Amazon, Starbucks and USPS Hackathons give a company's programming staff the opportunity to try out new ideas and collaborate with coders in a fun and managed environment. Robert Jandura-Cessna, founder of IMUZIK, a Syracuse, N.Y.
Why and How to Host a Hackathon. Hackathons. Open Data Project Brainstorming Form Fill this form out to describe your cool idea - click here Hackathon How-To Guide The Open Data Hackathon How to Guide - click here Project Ideas Spreadsheet Descriptions of projects that folks have come up with during our hackathons - click here Upcoming Hackathons Below are the dates for upcoming hackathons. Feb 22, 2014 - Open Data Day! Past Hackathons Feb 23, 2013 - Victoria City HallJune 2nd 2012 - QPAC, Victoria BC. Hosting Hackathons: Getting Awesome Sponsors. This is a first in a (hopefully) series of posts on how to host a student hackathon, based on my experience with PennApps, as well as from participating in HackNY and PhillyGameJam and the hackathons at Facebook over the summer. Organizing a hackathon costs money - even without paying for the space, large prizes and t-shirts, we spent nearly $3.5k (~$35/competitor) for PennApps Mobile on food and drinks over nearly 48 hours.
How do you raise something like that? Possible Funding Sources Here's what has worked for us: 1) Tech Companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc) Software engineers/hackers are in high demand. The bigger the company you contact, the more used they are to similar requests for sponsorship and the more likely they are to have a budget for it. [from Gareth:] Contacting a University Recruiter will tend to go further at a large company than contacting a friend who works there, since recruiters have a direct budget for things like this. 2) Venture Capitalists. The Awesomeness of a Hackathon. Over the years, a number of companies I’ve been an investor in have had hackathons. These are typically day long events where everyone in the company works on whatever cool new ideas they have. On Monday night I got a note from a company I’m on the board of about a hackthon they just completed.
As I looked through the list of things that the various teams created, I got chills of excitement. Most of the companies we invest in release software at least once a month. Some release weekly, or even daily. I’ve become a big advocate of true Agile development (partly because of my experience with Rally Software – the leader in Agile software development environments) and – more recently – the notion of trying to get to continuous deployment which has been popularized by Eric Ries. If you are releasing at least monthly, it’s easy to do a full day hackathon at least once a quarter. Pick a date during the quarter for the hackathon. Not all of the hackathon projects need to be about code. Wiki - Expenses. Details of any expenses you would need to attend should be placed on this page. Please remember to include your name next to the information. What we need is the costs of your flight/train/car.
If you do not need us to pay for the accommodation please say. Otherwise we will assume we are paying and reserve a room for you. David Golden (xdg) - accommodation: 5 nights - airfare: $915.30 (booked) - train: £32.80 (booked)user:ovid - train £150 - £200? Accommodation (happy to kip on someone's couch)user:schwern - accommodation, I'm not picky - travel likely to be $1500 USD.Kenichi Ishigaki (charsbar) - travel likely to be $1500 USD.Ricardo Signes (rjbs) - accomodation: ???
Last modified: 05/04/13 23:13 by David Golden (xdg) Tags:bookingexpenses Home | Edit this page | Tags | Recent changes | History. The How To Guide For Organizing a Successful Hackathon For Social Good | Dutiee. Hackathons are a great way to get developers and other creative people together and working on building ideas into web and mobile applications.
Imagine if this creative energy could be channeled to further your social mission. Many big companies like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn organize regular hackdays within their companies to give people an opportunity to come up with new ideas that help their users. A great example of this was the veterans hackday organized by LinkedIn which got developers involved in using technology to solve problems faced by veterans today such as staying in touch with other veterans or finding jobs. Last year we saw a number of Hackathons being organized in the social good space – Hack for Change by Change.org, Hacking Education by DonorsChoose.org, Random Hacks of Kindness, Summer of Smart Hackathons by Gray Area Foundation to name a few. We think creating your own personal hackathon around your social mission is a great way to start this year.
Few Tips. Toronto budget mini-”hackathon” report | Gabe Sawhney. Check out the cool stuff we made at the Toronto budget mini-hackathon this weekend! We parsed the 2012 city budget from a messy bunch of Excel files, and uploaded it to OpenSpending — which produces this interactive treemap: We also got the data into Tableau, and produced this less colourful but more readable treemap: We slogged through an XML snapshot from the city’s Lobbyist Registry data, filtered out everything except the “particulars” of lobbyist activities at the City of Toronto (basically, descriptions about what they’re meeting about).
It’s an ideal dataset for a tag cloud: We also took that operating budget data, and built a zoomable pack layout visualization with it, using d3.js. What we did, in more detail: I wrote a parser in PHP which (somewhat) automates the process of getting the budget data into a machine-readable format. Thanks to Andrew, Alex, Alex and David for participating! Stretch Goals Are Important (Or WizzyWig Won $100k in 48 Hours at a Hackathon) [ Summary: Stretch goals are important, and the ones we set for the first LAUNCH Hackathon this past March resulted in a team of three unknown 20-somethings from Pittsburgh building a killer product in 48 hours, landing over $100k in investment on the spot and later earning a slot at a prestigious accelerator.
On November 8-10 we host LAUNCH Hackathon 2 with stretch goals of 1k *actual* developers, $250k in investment prizes and five teams funded or accepted to accelerators. ] At some point 10 years ago I overheard the buzzword ‘stretch goals’ and it stuck in my brain. It might have been from an ex who was at Harvard Business School, or from reading Jack Welch.
Stretch goals, as far as I understand them, are lofty goals that you set even though you have no idea how to reach them at the time. My Three Stretch Goals Last year I started setting stretch goals for myself and my kick-ass teams. Three notable ones at LAUNCH: Stretch goals indeed. Cash money baby! BOOM: WizzyWig Wins Big 3. Best @jason. Open Data Hackathon How to Guide. Alice Ng: What Is A Hackathon And How Do They Empower Girls in Science And Technology? Editor's Note: This post is part of a series produced by HuffPost's Girls In STEM Mentorship Program. Join the community as we discuss issues affecting women in science, technology, engineering and math. Hackathons have been around for years, but few outside of the field of software development and computer engineering actually know of them, even fewer participate in these events.
It's unfortunate because hackathons are a utopia of the most ambitious, driven, curious, resourceful and quirky individuals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. So, what is a hackathon? Basically, it's a community event in which computer programmers, engineers, software developers, web designers, UX designers, project managers, mathematicians, scientists, and business minds come together to create a fully-functioning application or piece of hardware, and it's all done in tight time constraints often between 24 to 48 hours, although some have lasted longer.
10 tips for hackathon success | Appsembler. Posted by: Nate Aune 1 year, 4 months ago Comments The month of November was a busy month for hackathons in Boston with the Startup Weekend, Music Hack Day and AngelHack. This past weekend I participated in the Boston Angelhack, and wanted to share a few thoughts about the experience. If you've never been to a hackathon, they are typically a 24-48 hour event during which time your team needs to build a working prototype for a product, usually a web or mobile app, but some teams build actual hardware devices.
I've been to a lot of these hackathons, and have observed some patterns for what makes for a successful hackathon experience. So without further ado, here are 10 tips for hackathon success: 1. There's the temptation to go into a hackathon thinking that you're going to build a 1.0 version of a product. You need to think big, but start small. 2.
If you are a business guy and can't write code, you're going to need to convince a developer to join your team. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Hackathons are a terrible way to get new users. Why we're doing them anyway. - Michelle Wetzler of Keen IO. M. Wetzler wrote this post on November 20, 2012 When we started planning hackathons I thought “Wow! There are going to be 100 developers there!! We are going to get so many new customers this weekend!!” We got 1 new customer that weekend. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Hackathons are a terrible way to gain usersIf I measure the success of our hackathon participation by the number developers who created accounts and used Keen IO, hackathons have been a total failure. Some services like Parse are a great match for hackathons because they help developers very quickly build mobile apps.
This got us thinking hard about how to make our product more immediately and obviously useful. Face-to-face feedback From our first hackathon, I learned that sitting at a sponsor booth isn’t a good use of a weekend. Years of consulting experience trained me to give up being shy. I loved having this opportunity to watch other people interact with our UI and our API. Seeing people use your product is awesome! BC Ministry of Education Hackathon guide. To use Google Groups Discussions, please enable JavaScript in your browser settings, and then refresh this page.
New! Drag and drop to rearrange your apps. Sign in to try it. MoreEven more from Google Sign in Groups Home Click on a group’s star icon to add it to your favorites Recently viewed mozilla.webmaker.canada.bc Privacy Terms of Service Stumbled across this today, created by Liam Arthurs at the BC Ministry of Education, who has attended our events in the past. Digital Literay and data for young people- UK examples July 2013 Hi all This may also be of interest to this community.
. - show quoted text - _______________________________________________ webmaker-canada-bc mailing list webmaker-... #hackwithus july - Picatic.com. This event is now closed. Come and join us for an afternoon of hacking and light hearted competition. Work alone or with a team to build AI for a YET-TO-BE-ANNOUNCED game.
Your AI will go head to head in a massive multiplayer game, where you'll score points and someone will eventually emerge the winner. There will be honour, there will be glory, and there will be winners for multiple categories. Whether you're a designer, backend engineer, frontend wizard, or even a biz dev slave, all skillsets are appreciated and there'll be something for you to do. sendwithus and sponsors will be providing beer and pizza, so signup now to reserve your goods! Event format: Teams of 2-4, to bee formalized at the eventNature of the game, documentation, and scoring methods to be revealed at event4-5 hours of hack time followed by multi-ai competition Timetable: 11am - doors open1130 - teams organized1145 - reveal the game and api1pm - beer break5pm Pizza6pm Start ai-competition7pm Closing up + prizes.
Hackathons are a terrible way to get new users. Why we're doing them anyway. - Michelle Wetzler of Keen IO.