What is a HACKATHON and how to organise one?

Majid Ali Ganai
3 min readNov 18, 2021

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What is a hackathon?

Well the very first question likely to strike the mind of a person who in unaware of this term is ‘what is a hackathon’? So let’s first understand it. A hackathon is an event where a large count of people (usually in teams) participates to engage in collaborative computer programming. Thus, to put it in more clear sense, hackathons are coding events which are hosted with a motive to improve or build something new, like some software or an app.

Besides this, hackathons provide opportunities for people working together remotely to meet in person and connect with each other. They provide opportunities to generate new ideas and implement cross-team projects.

How to organise a hackathon?

Since you know what a hackathon is, you would have understood that they are not something very tough to host, unless you don’t have the proper strategy. So below are some tips shared to organise a successful hackathon:

1️⃣Plan everything smartly. It doesn’t work like someone decides to hold the event in a week and expect interested parties to come up with their projects and ideas. Hackathons are planned very early so all the participating teams could get time to think of a good idea and also set their course in conformation to the dates.

2️⃣Get help from experienced people who have either hosted hackathons or participated in them. It is always a good idea to collect others feedbacks and experiences as they can help you to plan better and more effectively. An organizing committee can be assembled by the organisers to prepare everything but it is better to hire experienced people if possible to take care of all the fuss.

3️⃣It is probable that every interested person could not bring up some idea or a project. So the organizers must keep a set of projects ready at their end which can be implemented by others. This improves the credibility of the whole event and the organiser as well.

4️⃣It is very important to note that working space provided to the teams must be comfortable for the job with proper required facilities. For this, the organising body must choose a good and favourable venue.

5️⃣Participations and efforts are full of life when there is competition for a reward. So it is always one of the major success factors that what prizes are to be given. Most of the organisers reward top performers with nice cash prizes.

These are some of the basic advices for a hackathon. Now it is obvious that participants get certificates for their participation. Thus, the level of participation somehow relates to the value of certificate and value of certificates depends upon their authenticity. For this, GiveMyCertificate provides verifiable certificates which are trusted by 1000+ organizations for their employees, interns and event participants as well. Learn more about their services on givemycertificate.com.

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