Hackathon Organizing Team Sizes

Last week we emailed all the hackathon organizer that work with MLH asking about how many folks you think should be on a hackathon organizing team.

We had a ton of replies, but Craig from StirHack left me an elegant response that deserved it’s own highlight:

Hey Shy

Just to answer the question in your email, I think that team sizes should be variable and dependent on the experience of the available potential team members, coupled with their willingness to take on work.

At StirHack, I run a senior command team — responsible for organisation and important points during the event — and a general volunteer team. Usually we’ll promote members from the general volunteer pool — which is usually comprised of younger members — to the senior team for some experience where they show interest and (potential) aptitude for the role. At times I will directly appoint people from outside that pool.

To come back to numbers, I think it depends on the scale of the event as well — a smaller event won’t need a full senior team of 6+ people trying to run it, with the caveat of how much experience they all have and how much time they have to sink into the event, but when things become more complex it is useful to have larger teams.

Drawing again from my own experience, the past two years there has been a senior team of 2/3, and then 4/5 people respectively for a 120–160 person event (including all staff and sponsor attendees as well). This year that number is expanding to around 14–16 due to the fact that we’re collaborating with another project I’m involved with on Data Literacy (who also wanted to host a hackathon just after ours, and it made no sense to host two in the same place quite close to each other), and it will essentially be four events in one under the main StirHack banner which is really quite exciting. SO having this expanded senior team now, with wings in both the Data Literacy and StirHack camps, allows for rapid delegation of area specific tasks (we’re doing 2 StirHack and 2 Data Literacy events over the weekend), whilst collaborating on fundraising and other areas.

One thing I have noticed is that delegation for delegation’s sake through having people on the senior team is a bad idea. It adds more people to the team, makes it harder to reach consensus on decisions, and seriously bloats the entire operation. Similarly, not adding those extra roles/people when needed negatively impacts the way the event runs. Both, I would say, can threaten the long term survival of the event.

Do you agree with Craig? Let us know!