Starting a tech club in your university or community (hackathons, tech talks, etc)
LauzHack has been organizing tech events for EPFL and European students since 2016. In this document, we uncover our planning process for large events at EPFL. While that document dives deep into specifics for EPFL, this blog post shares my experience and insight that may be useful for current (and future) organizers at EPFL and other communities.
Since 2016, LauzHack has organized 7 in-person hackathons, 2 online hackathons, and 33 tech talk/workshops. Most of our attendees are students at EPFL, a technical university in Switzerland, but our yearly hackathon also gathers participants from 30+ universities over 10+ countries.
Our events don’t typically follow a particular theme, with our mission to provide a space where students can learn, be creative, and build. In particular, learn and build those things which would be impossible (or rather incompatible) with their courses. Below are the winning projects from each edition:
- 2023: Virtual assistant for the visually-impaired 👨🦯
- 2023 (sustainability at EPFL): Giving items a second life ♻️
- 2022: Information retrieval of course materials with LLMs 🤖
- 2020: Game to simulate the decision of Covid policies in a city 🎮
- 2020 (solutions to Covid-19): Web interface for writing and sending letters to isolated elderly ✍️
- 2019: Immersive reading experience through adaptive lighting and sound 📖
- 2018: AR to display live info about industrial machines 🏭
- 2017: Using the Mac trackpad as a tablet 🖋️
- 2016: Digitized wardrobe 👚
Over the years, we’ve seen trends come and go, but a constant theme has always been exceptionally curious students willing to learn and try new things. Coupled with an increasing availability of powerful and versatile technologies, the quality of projects gets better and better each year.
What’s equally encouraging is to see others in our community embracing hackathons as a means for innovation in the topics they’re passionate about. Over the years, we’ve provided advice and collaborated with the various events/clubs: PeaceTech hackathon, Scala Center, S2S Ventures, Quantum Computing Association, Blockchain hackathon, JuliaEPFL, Data Analytics Group, EPFL Developers Club, OpenFood Hackdays.
When meeting with other organizers and clubs, we share our hackathon planning document (largely prepared by Solal!), which we hope serves as a useful starting point for others organizing events at EPFL. While it contains many details specific to EPFL, a lot is applicable elsewhere, in particular the tasks for a large event and their timing. Below I try to generalize the main insight from this document and from my experience in starting a club from scratch.
Enough promo! here are the tips 👇👇
🤔 Define yourself
People need to know what you’re about, and what they can expect from your event(s). Dream big. The scope will probably narrow as your figure out the logistical details, but can also grow more than you expect. Our focus with LauzHack is beginner-friendly tech events and giving students the shame-free space to learn and try new things. It started with a yearly hackathon in 2016, and in 2018 we started doing tech talks/workshops as a way to give students the confidence and skills for going to hackathons. From March 2023, our workshops became weekly, and now they also serve the purpose of teaching the EPFL community tech skills for their courses, research, and future work-life.
👥 Make friends
A community needs people, and the foundation will be a solid team. LauzHack started because when I was doing my Masters at EPFL: a friend from my Bachelor studies (at Jacobs University) asked if I wanted to organize a hackathon at EPFL. We had both participated in JacobsHack during our Bachelors, but there was no hackathon at EPFL at that time. He convinced me of the need, we went to EPFL’s CS association, convinced more people, put together a solid team, and the rest is history.
Within that team, it’s helpful to define clear roles: it’s ok if people do multiple things, but each core task should have someone responsible. For example for the LauzHack hackathon, we have (the different color codes in the planning document): (1) company sponsorship, (2) meals and food sponsorship, (3) communications/marketing, (4) swag purchasing, (5) finance, (6) IT, (7) logistics, and (8) judging.
Choose a digital space when you can share ideas and documents, for example a Google Drive or Notion. When2meet is great for scheduling meetings with busy people.
📍 How, what, where, when
You have your identity and the team to execute, now what’s your event(s) going to look like? How many people? Do you need to prepare content, or do you know someone who could give that talk? Maybe it already exists online? Reach out early to invited guests (speakers, judges, etc).
You’ll also need a venue and you’ll probably need money. Both of those will decide how many people you’ll have at your event, and what you can offer in terms of swag and food (you can never go wrong with pizza). Do you know an office space that you can borrow? Or do you know a professor or PhD student who can book a room? At someone’s apartment? It’s ok to start small, and once you get traction and have a track record, it will be easier to convince people to lend a better/bigger space. Based on the first logistics, you’ll probably need to re-visit the dreams from above.
📢 Spread the word
With all of the above (identity, team, first logistics), put yourself out there. Put up some posters (Canva is super easy to make nice designs), post on social media, ask other associations or your university to post on social media. And with whatever you put out there, there should always be a way for people to sign-up. It can be as simple as a Google form. My personal favorite for event sign-ups is Luma (check out this post for Luma best practices). If you’re interested, the source code for LauzHack’s page can be found here. Also, DevPost is great for having an all-in-one digital space for a hackathon without having to build something from scratch.
And when you do your events, remember to take pictures and post on social media. Be sure to get consent from your participants (we put a question in the sign-up).
🤝 Sponsors and partners
The first one is usually the toughest. You’ve got no track record, how do they know you’ll pull through? You can try partnering with another club that has more experience and an established network. When we were first getting started, LauzHack partnered with MLH, which (back in the day) got us GitHub as an automatic sponsor, which then reassured potential sponsors we were speaking to.
Once you have a digital presence, going to job fairs and hackathons is another great way to meet sponsors who are already putting money into events. On LinkedIn, you can look for people that have job titles such as “Campus recruiter” or “Developer/tech evangelist”. As a first sponsorship, just getting them to pay for the pizza/food is already a great step.
Food and drink sponsors are also great to have. Don’t hesitate to reach out by email/fill out contact forms. Often food/drink companies have samples that they would like to give for free to promote a product. And if you’re frequently ordering from the same pizza/food place, ask if you can do a partnership, where you’ll promote them on social media and in-person for a discount on orders.
You’ll probably reach out to a lot of people, and not get many replies. It’s part of the process. Use a document (or similar) to keep track of who you reached out to and when. Your future club members will thank you.
🔗 Engage your community
Use a forum/messaging app like a Telegram/WhatsApp group or a Discord server to build and maintain your community, and so that they can reach out to each other! Avoid paid services like Slack unless you’re sure to continue paying. Coordinate with other local clubs to cross-promote each other’s event so that your community feels like there’s always something interesting. Consistency is important. With other clubs at EPFL, we would create a monthly calendar to promote events across the campus (kudos to the Arnie for the design!).
That’s enough (for now 😉). It’s not an exhaustive list, but for that check out the planning doc), and if you’re ready to start organzing, check out this post on using Luma for managing event sign-ups. Feel free to comment if you have any questions, or to reach out at lauzhack[at]epfl[dot]ch. Good luck and happy hacking 🚀
