#wirvsvirushack
Motivated by the Covid-19 global pandemic a small number of very engaged people participated in what turned out to be the biggest remote hackathon from March 20th through March 22nd. This is the story of of Axel Springer Ideas Engineerings participation — the tears, the laughter and the outtakes. Brace yourselves!
Remote Hackathons, Really?
All of us were quite frankly sceptic in the beginning. How would this thing go down? Will people engage enough if not onsite, or at least together in the same room? What kind of challenges are there going to be if everyone can propose ideas?
I won’t bore you with answering each of those questions because…. Yeah, remote hackathons actually work.
Setting The World Record — Or So They Say It Happened
But, who would have thought that our first remote hackathon would also be the first remote hackathon to break the World record.
Just to give you a few numbers:
- 43.000 registered participants
- 1.900 challenge sponsors
- 2.900 mentors
- 27.000 active users on the platform
- 13.000 profiles with Devpost
- 1.500 uploaded projects
- 100 projects proposed by government departments
- 464.866 Slack messages (and counting…)
I don’t want to hide the fact that the organizers had some trouble that delayed the start of the actual hackathon, but given the numbers you just read it’s quite an achievement they have managed to keep this thing not only running but also bring down Slack by manually adding 43K participants to the platform.
Pick A Challenge
When faced with the vast number of challenges that were proposed by either participants or the German Government we had trouble to match our idea to the given structures.
Given the number of ideas, it took us some time to figure out where to match our solution to. In order to be able to find later the presented solution the organizers asked the participants to include the official hashtag of the hackathon, together with the cluster number of the challenges as well as its full name in all our deliverables.
Those seem to be details you as a reader don’t really wanna deal with, but when one puts him/herself under stress to come up with a good solution, those little things stand between you and handing in your contribution to combat Covid-19, it’s a little annoying. This is something for the *stop doing this* list in retrospective.
Communication Is Key
All of us stumble upon this phrase basically on a daily basis and yes, we need to communicate in order to distribute todos and keep track of the progress. This is something that worked out pretty well. We had brief sync calls at least twice per day and build smaller sub-teams to get the work done.
The dedication and curiosity people demonstrated in order to get this hackathon within our team up and running has been exceptional.
The Idea & Our Solution
When people come (virtually) together great things can happen and so they did, while we brainstormed ideas to bring to the #wirvsvirushack.
We combined our ideas to have a location based service and a digital handshake in order to be able to trace back who people met within the past two weeks of using our app.
In order to have proper entry for the hackathon we collected all information on our project in devpost and uploaded our pitch video to YouTube.
The Fun Part
After the work was done by the colleagues that gave input for the application itself, two of us brainstormed ideas on how to set up the pitch video. Presentation slides? BOOOORING. Just speaking and explaining? Nope, that’s so 1930s … Let’s do something different…
What we came up with was fun…and if you scroll all the way down to this article you might have a laugh as well.
The Learnings
- Attend a remote hackathon!
- When you attend your first remote hackathon be patient with the organizers…It might be their first remote hackathon as well.
- Keep your team structured. We had sync calls with the entire team at least twice per day and in-between calls in our sub-teams. In that way everyone knew what was going on, what was needed and how to contribute.
- Spell out tasks very clearly — we tend to get lost in translation of what we hear vs. what we understand.
- Have fun, cause otherwise — why attend at all? You’re investing your time in this thing and this is something that should be fun.
Bottom Line
I’ll do it again!
