Hackathon Stories
It’s time for hackers to start telling our story
I gave a talk at HackCon 2014, a conference for college hackathon organizers. This is what I said, or, at least, what I wanted to say. You can also take a look at the raw slides.
Before I talk about stories for hacking, I want to talk about storytelling as a cultural construct. We tell stories for a lot of reasons. We tell stories to entertain, we tell stories to record. But one of the biggest reasons we tell stories is to communicate and celebrate our values. Think about the stories we tell children, or the stories from religious texts. We tell stories because they hook people emotionally, and that lets us communicate something more abstract, like our values.
Hackathons are now at a point where our values are starting to solidify and come together. And, critically, we’re also at point where the world is beginning to know us. College hackathons weren’t a “thing” a year ago. Now we’re definitely a thing.
Last week, I asked a group of 300-some hackathon leaders what they wanted from our community in 2014. Although there were some disagreements about things like hackathon size, it’s clear that, overwhelmingly, our values are aligned.
Here are the top eight responses:
Now, storytelling isn’t some crazy cure-all. It’s not going to help us with all these things. But it’s a surprisingly powerful tool, and I think it can help us with six of those eight.
First, let’s talk about more inclusive environments and especially getting more girls to go to hackathons. We covered this in depth yesterday, but one of the reasons that people stay away from hackathons is the belief that it’s “not for me.” “Not my scene,” they say.
Well, good stories help us show off the diversity of people who do go as well as the breadth of the hacks that they make. Good stories help us show that hackathons are for everybody.
By the way, the misconception about “hacking” itself, of course, doesn’t help. I’ve talked to young women—who are studying computer science—who expect hackathons to be about breaking things.
Good stories give us a chance to say “no, not that kind of hacking.” And frankly I think we should take every chance we get to say that.
Another thing that people wanted was broader recognition from outside the hacker community. We all know that hackathons are changing our industry, but we want the rest of the world to know that, too.
One of the main ways we can get this is through press.
Tech blogging is a funny thing—if you can package a good story for a reporter, they are much more likely to run a story on you. You can see here how a blog post from PennApps (“Who’s Hacking What: The Musical Toilet”) transformed into an article on PandoDaily (“Meet Musical Toilet, the latest innovation the ‘connected bathroom’”).
If we, as a community, can tell compelling stories about our events, we’re more likely to get good press about them.
One other thing that a lot of people wanted was for hacks to “live on” past the end of hackathons. That can both that hackers keep working on their projects, and also that people use (and love) those projects. A good story about a hack can, at the very least, help us remember that project, and at best, it can help encourage people to keep working on their projects and help publicize the project to potential users. Celebrating cool hacks is one way we can celebrate our values.
Lastly, stories are crucial to communicating our values across the hacking community. We’re all incredibly lucky to come to HackCon, where we can share our experiences and our knowledge, but not everyone can do that. How can we best communicate our values and goals across schools and across the country? Stories are unbelievably helpful here.
So how do we make this happen? How do we tell good stories?
Well, this is something I’ve been working on independently for a little over a year now. I’ve been going to hackathons, and trying to write about them. Trying to tell stories about them. This has been an incredibly interesting challenge, and I’ve learned so much from it.
The first thing I’ve learned is that there are a bunch of different formats for a single post, and that different formats can have very different effects. My favorite format is definitely the team interview: this celebrates our values most clearly and can also be a relatively straightforward path to press. I’m delighted to see roottv digging in on this—I expect that to be really effective.
I’ve also learned that I need to stick what I know. I am not a photographer. I can take my own photos in a pinch, but ultimately this is distracting and I’m not very good at it. That said, I’ve had the best results working with a team. I can get great results when working with a couple of photographers.
Lastly, I’ve found it’s easy to get sucked into other things at hackathons—whether that’s helping distribute food, or judging hacks, or providing technical mentorship—these are all things I’ve ended up doing instead of writing. When I start doing that, my writing almost inevitably suffers.
But the biggest thing I’ve learned is this:
I do not scale.
I cannot tell the story of hackathons by myself, and even a dedicated team of volunteer writers and photographers won’t be able to capture the incredible breadth of our community.
We need to make storytelling part of the culture of hacking. We need to get hackers to start telling their own stories.
In a lot of ways hackers already do this. In a lot of ways, we’re all already pretty good at telling our stories.
For example, it’s pretty standard to live-tweet at events. Not everyone does it, but a lot of us do. And we all know to do it, and we all know how to do it, because live-tweeting demos is behavior that’s been modeled for us. When I went to my very first hackathon, I picked up on it, because Alexey was doing it, and Pulak was doing it, and Rob Spectre was doing it, and—damn, just, like, everyone was doing it. So I did it too.
Another example are these Dave Fontenot memes. We all make them. We know how to make them, because the leaders in our community make them, and we’re telling some story with them. This is a story we tell all the time. Is it the story we want to tell?
It’s hard to know what’s actionable here. As organizers, what can you do to encourage storytelling in our community?
It’s certainly a question I’m still struggling to answer, but I have a few ideas for where to begin.
The first is that we keep trying to model good stories in the community. That means recruiting people to focus on telling stories for the community—like me—but that also means organizers spend some time telling their own stories, too.
I know this may seem tangential, especially when we’re running around trying to make sure everyone’s well-fed and happy. But this is our chance to really make an investment in our future. What if we had half a dozen amazing stories from hackathon newbies, describing their first experiences? That would be an incredible asset. It’s also our chance to put our best foot forward. We are just beginning to make waves in our industry. We have the chance to tell the stories that we want people to hear.
Now is our time. We have a chance to write our own history. What’s it gonna be?
