Not Another Virtual Event: How Hackathon Made a Cultural Impact
Building community in a virtual, hybrid world is a daunting task. On that side of the calendar invite, right before the send button is clicked, there is a world of logistics, planning, and aspirations that most people don’t think about. I know this feeling all too well, not only having coordinated various virtual events and meetings since the beginning of the pandemic, but also as a planner for this year’s hackathon. A couple of thoughts haunted me as we set out to plan for this event: How are we supposed to drum up excitement about working on extra projects in teams from their individual home desks? How do we connect folks spread out in different organizations and time zones across the world?
I’m currently in that mid-point between the lingering triumph of our last hackathon, and already thinking about planning for the next one — and I sit here full of reflections of what surprisingly worked really well, and what I learned to do better as we think about the next event.
The Event Dynamics and Challenges
The executive leaders had a few specific thoughts around this hackathon: a hybrid event that is mostly remote but with some in-person opportunities, thoughtful inclusion of our global teams, and an invitation for new ideas to create a more robust event than we have in the past. Oh — and we also designed this particular hackathon, traditionally an Engineering event, to be opened up to the entire company across all departments for the very first time. Challenge accepted.
I’ll admit, we started with grandeur plans. There was the hope of a recruiting event, a notion of inviting external executives for a Q&A panel, the fun idea of mini events and games throughout the hack week. Spoiler alert: none of those things happened. What actually happened: paring it back to the core of what hackathon is all about — being able to brainstorm and build out big ideas, while being able to also introduce hackathon to newbies, with some added extras along the way.
New and Improved!
Though we ended up focused on simplicity more than anything else, there was still room for designing a virtual event that felt exciting. Again, this was the first time Bluecore made hackathon inclusive to everyone in the company, so we went beyond the straightforward announcements at town halls and also got creative with releasing video promotions over Slack leading up to the sign-ups. We invited all interested hackathon participants to pitch their ideas to over 100 attendees for a full 60 minutes. Teams were formed by a simple Google Sheet, with people from all different parts of the organization volunteering to be a part of projects solely because they like the ideas. Swag was designed for all active participants, virtual backgrounds were created, and everything was branded from the visuals to the lingo. During the four-day Hack Week (the four days were also a new thing, by the way — typically Bluecore’s hackathon is half the length of time), we encouraged people to use the time they needed to work together in their teams and also attempted to bring everyone together by asking a themed Question of the Day in Slack — a Bluecore Engineering tradition in the earlier pandemic days. We also invited reputable external judges outside of Bluecore for final presentations which added an exciting layer to the finishing teams.
The Result
Though the planning committee clearly enjoyed the more creative components to the event, the best and most consistent feedback I heard after hackathon was over was that people had fun. Fun working in their teams, fun working on creative solutioning for problems they cared about, fun having the time and opportunity to innovate. Overall we had 125 total participants which was around 40% of the company and 31 project submissions to review. Since this was an ambitiously cross-collaborative event and the first of its kind, I was floored to see that 31% of the event participants were from non-Engineering teams (as in, not engineering or product) with the make-up of 32% of the teams involving three or more people from different teams. This goes to show that all the branded swag in the world cannot replace how energizing it is to come together to work on creative solutions — the core spirit of what hackathon is all about.
What We Learned
While we can call this hackathon a success, there were certainly things we could have done differently. We were overwhelmed by the participation and number of submissions and can streamline the process in the future by giving the judges plenty of time to review and narrow down their favorites (which proved to be an incredibly difficult task!). We received feedback that some of the logistics and communications around sign-ups were confusing and could be clearer next time. There were a few shipping delays around the swag. All-in-all, nothing that cannot be fixed or tweaked to improve when we plan the next event. What we truly took away from all of this was that creating this cross-collaborative event impacted the company culture in more ways than imagined. With the great ideas sprouted from all across the organization, by some teams and people working together for the very first time and by choice, to the executive leadership team who were incredible partners and promoters for hackathon, and down to the planning committee who spent months organizing and meeting on a weekly basis — we experienced what it means to be as simple as possible, but as powerful as necessary — a Bluecore value and the very theme for this 2022 hackathon. An event’s theme that is woven into and exemplified with its very being…well, I think we nailed it.
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