HackTheLib: an analysis of the first two years
Learn about how we’ve expanded and how we plan on expanding further!
As a co-founder of HackTheLib (formerly HackSTL), I thought it would be a good idea to put together some numbers from the past two hackathons that we’ve hosted to show our team and participants where we started from and where we plan on taking this hackathon in the future. I narrowed down some of the most important metrics that help bring out the scale and performance of hackathons in order to show our progress and our potential for future growth. Let’s get right into it.
Sign-ups
Our first area of interest involves the active participation of hackathon attendees. Here, we aim to identify whether or not our platform has grown over the span of a year. Coming into the hackathon, we hoped for significant growth in this area, seeing as we spent a bit more time planning out the finer details (although the coronavirus halted our in-person plans).
From 83 participants at HackSTL 2019, we’e expanded to 205 this summer. Though this increase in the number of participants can be partly attributed to the transition from an in-person hackathon to an online hackathon, we hope that our next hackathon (whether it be online or in-person) will exceed this year’s numbers.
Submissions
Our second area of interest revolves around the number of projects that were submitted for judging.
There exists a three-fold increase in submissions from 2019 to 2020, mostly caused by the increase in the number of participants. To account for that underlying variable, we can create a sub-metric called the submission-to-participant ratio. Increases in this metric could either mean smaller groups or more participants submitting their products.
This year, a greater percentage of participants submitted a project. Great! We’re also looking to increase this metric at our next hackathon!
Judging
Our third area of interest is all about our judges. Who are they and how many did we have?
The number of judges isn’t really too important; I just thought it’d be nice to show that we did get an extra judge for this edition of HackTheLib. More importantly, the biggest improvement with regards to judging is that, this year, all of our six judges had experience in the technology industry!
Website
We didn’t set up Analytics for our premiere, so we can only provide raw data about this year’s rendition.
Pretty impressive. We were really proud that we generated clicks from countries outside the United States. With over 500 website users, we are almost certain that we’ve grown from last year in this respect.
Conclusion
Overall, we had a great experience organizing HackTheLib! We hope that all the participants had a great time and a unique experience making their projects. As of right now, the date of our next hackathon is to be determined (but as a small teaser, there has been talk of multiple HackTheLib events each year!). Anyways, thanks for reading! We hope to see you again sometime soon, everyone!
Note: If you want to learn about organizing a virtual hackathon, I highly suggest looking over this article by Rayaan, another HackTheLib organizer: .
