Scaling to our Roots: What it Means to Code for Good
HackDuke, like many other hackathons, started out as an idea — a group of really talented, excited people (s/o to Ashley and Dennis) thought it would be cool to put on an event where students got together and made stuff for impact. The first ever HackDuke was a mad dash, with that same group trying to convince the administration what they were doing was legitimate and scrambling to get people to come. HackDuke celebrated collaboration, emphasized impact, and focused on the individual’s growth and development. That was what was important.
But hackathons grow, and more companies sponsor, and the venue needs to get bigger, and the food orders get more and more expensive. And sometimes, we lose sight of the big picture.
Last year, HackDuke had around 800 participants. As our team reflected in the aftermath of the hackathon, we realized that we were straying away a little too far from our foundation. HackDuke started to seem too commercialized, too impersonal, too focused on the sponsors, and too big for our own good. Privilege in the tech realm is often ignored and overlooked in favor of money; at hackathons especially, teams are oftentimes focused on networking and competing for prizes or an interview instead of simply getting together and creating something impactful for the sake of it. Even with donations to charity as prizes, we felt as though we weren’t able to cultivate an environment that was conducive to effective mentorship and altruism that was (and is) so important to us, and truly enable our participants to build for social impact. At the end of the school year, our organizing team had a meeting in which we decided to scale our hackathon down almost by half to 500 participants. This year, we’re hoping to go back to our roots and effectively emphasize community, learning, and building together.
So what? Tangibly, what does this mean?
This means that when you come to HackDuke, you come to code for good — more specifically, that means that our team is dedicated to providing the resources and experience to help you explore the intersection between tech and social good in a way that we haven’t before.
We’ll be providing more resources and mentorship (both technical and community based) to encourage collaboration and exploration of the realms; we’re especially encouraging beginners to come and learn in an atmosphere that emphasizes community and focuses less on competition.
We are much more interested in emphasizing the importance of giving back in a meaningful way, synthesizing ethics and tech to cultivate collaboration, and empower our hackers to create better projects within a more cognizant hacker culture. Many hackathons are getting bigger and bigger to accommodate more sponsors and more hackers without considering the delicate balance between expansion and experience. We’re hoping that by scaling down, we can take steps to steady that balance and create the experience our hackathon was founded on.
Of course, that’s not to say there aren’t drawbacks to this approach — we aren’t able to accommodate as many hackers, and may run into some roadblocks in our quest to scale our event down. And making this decision took a lot of deliberation and some convincing — not everyone on our team agreed on size or rationale.
But we’ve put a lot of thought and and a lot of love and a lot of time into this, and we’re excited — really excited about these changes and we hope you will be too.
Please feel free to reach out to us if you’re interested in learning more about our thought process or want to speak to any of us about our decision. And a quick plug: apps are open — register now!
