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Brainstorm: what does a “magical” hackathon look like to you?

Below is our raw unfiltered brainstorm we all participated in at the start of the organising process! You'll see how a lot of the inspired the final event.

  • Fun games/other activities that require participation from almost everyone. (example: on Zephyr, we played a murder mystery game). This could maybe take the form of a scavenger-hunt/collaborative CTF-like event (something that has a coding aspect but also utilizes our physical environment) 🔥
  • Various creative prompts, challenges, etc. to serve solely as inspiration for projects. Encouraging wacky/just-for-fun projects, cross-team collaboration.
  • We want everyone to be on a team they enjoy working/spending time with. How can we make sure this happens?
  • Unexpected surprises/characters/people, like the gorilla (on Zephyr this contributed significantly to the magical feeling). Idea: maybe we could build a remote-controlled robot that wanders throughout the hackathon 🔥
  • Some sort of central scrapbook-like thing
  • Workshops should be organized like Hack Club Workshops, i.e. collaborative and learn-by-building with lots of creative examples rather than a scripted tutorial
  • Everyone shipping a project (complexity will vary according to experience but everyone walking away having built something)
    • Or at least learning something new
  • Opportunities to form personal connections (this could be just meal time or like on Zephyr where people went to each other’s hotel rooms and hung out or when people explored the city in their own groups)
  • Cool swag to remember the experience
  • Ability to get help if needed (so a really good support system that empowers attendees to be excited about what they are building)
  • A very unconventional hackathon experience that will be different from anything the attendee has experienced(excl zephyr)- namely, the anti-hackathon model. An overall design less reliant on winning but learning, socializing, and collaboration.
  • Would be super cool to have something like zephyrnet but doesn't exactly seem required as it would not be an offline one
  • We NEED to get el farolito burritos. This is an absolute must
  • For hydrahacks i suggested doing this project where we had a “hacker cup”, namely there are multiple harry potter style houses, and there is an overall pointage for each house. There would be prizes for both houses and individuals and the houses could promote collaboration in CTFs. We could try something similar, maybe? 🔥
  • People aren’t just motivated by prizes and judging isn’t just the person with the best project they fork for each hackathon
  • A custom experience that doesn’t involve using Devpost (imo seems too cookie cutter and every traditional hackathon uses it; doesn’t seem very hack club-ey)
  • Some connection time where people aren’t expected to be working on their project 🔥
  • Swag
  • Interesting visitors like we did on Zephyr (slightly mythical people lol). This is really essential IMO
  • Lots of collaboration even between teams if there are any: People walking around to check out other projects
  • New friends
  • A physical ticket
  • Silly projects are encouraged!
  • The organizers themselves may hack on stuff
  • Perhaps a few “Tool Centers” so there’s a table with a lot of hardware components you can play around with, a table with … (I’m trying to think of other things that people may want to play with that often cost money)
  • All staff is approachable and can be made friends with
  • People who are excited about making things and having conversations with people.
    • How to facilitate human connections?
    • Team activities
      • CTF
      • a couple hours to explore the city in small groups / get food, etc.
      • collective projects—eg. adds a page to a site like Pass the Story, chronicles.zephyr
  • Every night, everyone demos the stuff they worked on to everyone.
  • Something tangible to remember the experience
    • Idea: having 3D printers / laser cutters / tools that people can use to make physical things for their projects
  • Activity idea: lightning talks—people can give a 1-3 min presentation about anything they want. I'm thinking that this would be similar to the PowerPoint Party event that @juliebeans hosted in Slack a while ago (I actually didn't attend so idk). The preparations should require very little preparation like 10 mins to assemble an optional quick slide deck or script. The topics could be anything ranging from a random fun project you built, history of bread, different types of fonts, etc. 🔥
  • Fun/whimsical/creative/wacky projects
  • What if we had a physical server where people could deploy their projects? Is deploying projects ever a barrier in hackathons?
    • At a hackathon I went to once, the Wi-Fi was terrible, which was a barrier for many
  • A ton of passion in the room (from organizers + attendees)
  • Flexibility to do what you’d like
  • Great food. Good enough music.