How did I organize the first-ever hackathon in my hometown?
My name is Sher Sanginov, and I am currently doing a machine learning internship at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. I come from one of the ancient cities in the world Khujand which is located in Tajikistan. You have probably never heard of my country before. Let’s look at the map.
Tajikistan is one of the former Soviet Union countries and gained its independence in 1991. It is one of the developing countries in Central Asia with a population of 9 million people. The official language in Tajikistan is Tajik, which is a Persian language and Russian is another major language spoken in the country. This is mainly because Tajikistan was a former Soviet Union country, and there are many Russian loan words in Tajik language too. Moreover, most of the TV channels people watch are in Russian. I come from Khujand city, the second largest city in Tajikistan.
I never knew what hackathon was until I came to the United States for college. For those who do not know what a hackathon is: A hackathon is usually a day long (can be 10 hours, 36 hours, 48 hours, etc.) event where many passionate professionals and students, interested in technology and business development, come together, form teams to build and design a product (i.e web application, app), make pitches and work towards creating a solution using a technology and business plan.
In 2015, I got four-year full tuition scholarship from Berea College which is located in Berea, KY. During 3 years of college, I’ve attended many MLH hackathons in the United States.
I always had a desire to organize the first ever hackathon in my home country. As a result, in the spring of my junior year in college, I decided to take a leave of absence for a semester with the goal of doing a tech-related community outreach and organize the first ever hackathon in my hometown. During this 4 month, I visited many universities, held seminars advocating the importance of computer science, diversity and inclusion in computing, women in tech and organized many developer workshops about various new technologies such as Google Cloud, Firebase, Progressive Web Apps, and many other breakthrough technologies.
It is very important to start early if you are planning to organize a hackathon event. I really recommend reading Major League Hacking’s organizer guide if you are planning to organize one: https://guide.mlh.io
3 month before the hackathon, I went through my to-do-list in order to organize a successful hackathon. These are the tasks I came up with:
- Lock down a venue — it is very important to find the right location for your hackathon. In my case, I chose American Corner Library in my city. American Corners are partnerships between the Public Affairs sections of United States Embassies and host institutions. They provide access to current and reliable information from and about the United States via book collections, the Internet, and through local programming to the general public overseas or abroad.
2. Set up a placeholder website for your hackathon — if your event doesn’t have a website, it doesn’t exist for most people.
It is very important to set up a basic website about your event, sponsors and most importantly, the website should have some type of a registration form so people can register easily if they are interested.
In my case, I built a static, responsive hackathon website using HTML/CSS and hosted it on Github Pages for free. For a registration form, I had a register button on the website that redirects you to a Google form once clicked. If interested, take a look: https://khujandhacks.github.io
3. Find sponsors to your event — it is nearly impossible to organize a hackathon without money so it is very important to talk to companies early to to sponsor the event. In my case, I applied to 2018 Major League Hacking Hackathon Season as a Member Event however, I was rejected because currently the League does not sponsor events in my region. However, they recognized my event as a MLH Localhost Hackathon! When you host an MLH Localhost event, they send you everything you need to run it. Here’s what they sent me:
- Hackathon Organizer’s Guide
- Hackathon Opening Presentation
- Hackathon Closing Presentation
- Assorted Stickers & Swag from Major League Hacking (MLH)*
- Software Activations and Credits; 100 MLH coupon for one free first year registration of a new .COM, .NET, or .ORG domains*
You can learn more about MLH Localhost: localhost.mlh.io
I also got sponsorships from several tech companies in Khujand such as Doodle.tj, a web design and marketing agency and Durandesh.com, software development company, and the US Embassy in Tajikistan and these sponsors took care of hackathon prizes, food and other expenses.
4. Promote you event — one of the most important goals in organizing an event is being able to promote the event. In my case, I attended several universities in my hometown to promote a hackathon. Moreover, I created an official Facebook Page for a hackathon and constantly made posts to promote the event. As a result, the event got a huge public interest and we were able to get 125 people who registered for the hackathon. However, we were only able to accept 75 people because of the venue limits.
5. One month before — final things to consider 1 month before a hackathon is to book mentors and judges, get final headcount, create a hackathon schedule, send reminders, and line up great prizes.
On April 30th, 2018, the first ever hackathon finally took place in my hometown and I named it “KhujandHacks”. We had an amazing turnout at the hackathon. There were 16 teams with 16 great real-world projects and 5 teams won. For many of the participants, it was their first time attending a hackathon.
Some of the projects that won prizes during the hackathon were: “TajMed” — a web-based platform that has all the information about the illness history of a patient and helps patients to find a good-rated doctor to go to by allowing them to make appointments on a platform.
There was another team that were working on a similar project but used Machine Learning to diagnose patients illness. “My City” — is another project that took the third place. It was an IOS application that helped tourists coming to Tajikistan learn more about places to visit, places to stay, restaurants, and had a feature to connect tourists with a tour guide.
The first ever hackathon in my hometown, Khujand, was very successful and I’m planning to organize another one the next time I travel back to my country. Currently, I’m in the States working towards getting my undergrad degree in computer and information sciences.
If you want to talk to me about anything, feel free to contact me. You can find my contacts info on the resume section of my personal website: www.shersanginov.com
Hope you enjoyed reading this article.
