How to Attract the Best Collaborators

We often see hackers get a little anxious about sharing their ideas. In this article we’ll share a handful of simple tips which will make you more comfortable when sharing ideas at a hackathon.

The general format for the kick-off of a hackathon is relatively consistent. Sometime within the first hour of the event, attendees with an idea on which they need help hacking will present it to the group. Teams then self-organize around the ideas.

When talking from the platform, stick to these three talking-points:

1. Describe your idea succinctly

2. Define the stack (technologies) you intend on using

3. Identify the skills of the collaborators you need

Example

Team leaders at small- and medium-sized businesses have a hard time keeping track of how their employees utilize sick days and vacation time. This weekend, I’m gathering a team to build Vatio. Vatio will allow team members to notify their peers when they are sick and request future vacation time from their manager through Slack, instead of fumbling with a web application.

We’ll be building a hypermedia API with Node.js and PostgreSQL on Heroku. We’ll use Slack’s oAuth 2 implementation for account creation. I’ve verified that Slack’s API has the necessary features for us to build this product. I already own the domain name vat.io and we’ll use Zerigo for DNS. We’ll also be designing and coding a single-page marketing website for prospective users to learn about the product and sign-up.

I’m a Node.js developer. I’ll need a DevOps engineer, a visual designer and a front-end developer.

If you can deliver a message similar to the example above inside two minutes, you are very likely to attract the exact collaborators you need!