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Find a Venue

Venues can make or break an event. A good venue will help you to ensure that the event runs smoothly, while a bad one will cause you to bounce around like a pinball trying to fix last minute everythings.

When we look for venues to run our events here’s a list of things we look for:

A location easy to get to, ideally near mass transit.
A wifi network that can handle a hundred people at once. (Not always easy)
The venue has either a lot of places to plug in or the ability to place more power strips out.
A venue that has projectors and screens.
A staff member that can be there during the event.
A venue can’t provide anything. Most of the time, this just means food. However, this can include other random items such as:

Dongles (Because nobody has a laptop that will connect to your projector. You need one that links to VGA, Mac to HDMI, Mac to VGA, and so forth and so on.)
Name Badges
Snacks, Water, and Pop (remember to bring the healthy stuff)
Power strips
Post-it notes
White Boards / Paper Easels
Microphones / PA system
Projector, Screen
USB Drives
Swag (laptop stickers, t-shirts)
Directional signage (Where’s the bathroom?)

Develop an Agenda

Your agenda will vary depending on the goal of your hackathon and it’s something that you should determine early on in your planning.

There’s a temptation to have hackathons become two day sprints with participants getting little to no sleep. However, if the goal of the hackathon is to develop prototypes versus fully working apps – you may not need really need to make a coffee run at 2 in the morning.

The formats for our event tend to follow this general flow depending on what we’re trying to accomplish:

7:00am Event organizers arrive to help set up.
7:30am Food/Coffee/Water arrives
8:00am Breakfast
8:30am Welcome (“Hi, welcome! Here’s the wifi password, the bathrooms are over there.”)
8:45am Education (“Here’s what we’ve done so far, here are some resources”) [You can also cover this in a pre-event]
9:00am Problem Set (“Here’s the problem I’m facing in the day-to-day”) [You can also cover this in a pre-event]
10:00am Q & A (“Would this be helpful?” “How does this activity work?”)
10:15am Break out to form teams and hack!
12:00pm Lunch served
4:00pm Hacking ends, judging begins (if applicable)
4:30pm Project winners announced (If applicable)

Variations on this include having the talking portion of the event happen on a Friday night. (This is particularly helpful if you’re trying to have working prototypes by the end of the event.) This allows for a full day (or full two days) of hack time.

If we’re doing more of an unconference event, the format will go something like this:

7:00am Event organizers arrive to help set up.
7:30am Food/Coffee/Water arrives
8:00am Breakfast
8:30am Welcome (“Hi, welcome! Here’s the wifi password, the bathrooms are over there.”)
8:45am unConference 101 (“Here’s how unconferences work”)
9:00am Icebreaker (“Everyone is going to form a line based on a statement. If you agree head to the right, disagree head to the left. OK, the weather is too cold!”)
9:30am Throw session ideas on the board, vote, assign rooms
10:00am First Session
11:00am Second Session
12:00pm Lunch served (Throw out and vote on afternoon sessions)
1:00pm Third Session
2:00pm Forth Session
3:00pm Group Returns & Report backs (Here’s what we talked about)

These are just general examples and in the course of running the event you may find yourself running a bit behind. We always assume that things are going to run over by about 15 mins and just prepare accordingly. (We sometimes use the lunch hour to make up for time.)

First, Focus on the problem

Civic hackathons work best when focused on a specific problem set. The best way to highlight these problems is to bring in a subject matter expert who deals with the problem on an everyday basis. What to do a hackathon about crime? Better call the police department. Want to do something around housing? Recruit somebody from the local housing authority or somebody who runs a shelter. When trying to think about the needs and challenge of the front line, there’s no substitute for somebody who actually works in the front line to speak at your event.

You also shouldn’t wait until the day of the event to provide your participants with resources. By providing a resource list ahead of time (like this one we put together for the Chicago Police Department Safer Communities Hackathon) it helps get participants better prepare for the event. Hackathons may have challenge components, but that doesn’t mean everyone absolutely has to start from scratch.