Documenting nwHacks 2019
How documentation proved time and time again to be our saving grace when it came to organizing Western Canada’s largest hackathon
Imagine you just finished organizing a hackathon and are off to graduate or focus on the rest of your degree. Now imagine the fresh faces joining your organizing team never having attended a hackathon before. How will the new organizers know how to put your hackathon together and make it better?
If organizing nwHacks 2019 taught me one thing, it was to DOCUMENT EVERYTHING!
I spent this past year leading the logistics behind nwHacks 2019. I’ll give you a brief history of our documentation practices and describe ways in which documentation were our lifesavers before, during, and after our hackathon.
A very brief history of documentation at nwPlus
Pre-2019 😢
We had a disorganized Google drive full of receipts and spreadsheets, while some of us had access to the previous year’s slack workspace.
Post-2019 😍
Have you seen such beauty? Side note: SO. MANY. EMOJIS. 😍
Our documentation hub: Notion 📝
This year, Notion was the newest addition to our work stack at nwPlus. Notion is an customizable and user friendly tool that allows team members to collaborate and easily integrate things such as file attachments and task boards into their documentation. Each individual team had their own page which all nwPlus members can view and contribute to.
Although we are using Notion, there are many other team collaboration tools out there such as AirTable, Confluence, and Trello.
Before the hackathon 😊
Task boards
Task boards are an efficient way to assign people to tasks and visualize the team’s progress. For the logistics team, all of the main task cards were made and assigned to a month at the beginning of the year. This gave us a task-based timeline while still being able to work in monthly “sprints”.
For tasks such as rentals and bookings, we documented information such as order summaries, costs, and contact information so next year’s organizers are able to refer to them. Without documentation, who’s going to remember details like having 120 8'x30" and 20 8'x40" tables?
Tutorials and requests
For the previous 2 years of nwHacks, we utilized NFC-enabled nametags for tasks such as event registration, food serving, and coat check. The dev team made a user guide for the NFC apps organizers needed to use at the event.
Request boards were also utilized by certain teams for other members to request tasks such as adding sponsor logos to the website and social media shoutouts.
Discussions are documentation too!
A new idea we introduced this year was to include all hackathon related discussions in public Slack channels, with Slack as our principle means of communication. To prevent clutter, all discussions are made as threads under a topic message.
This allows discussions to be searchable on Slack, and to maintain transparency and accountability for decisions made.
During the hackathon 🏃
Signage
When coordinating over 800 people in a gigantic venue, it is important to make all the signs. We made signs for everything ranging from directional labels to dietary restrictions to ensure all participants know where to find everything. Remember, some participants are flying in from around the world and have never been to your venue before!
We had our signs planned and written down weeks in advance so the design team could turn them into aesthetic, on-brand goodness.
Slack announcements
As many meals, workshops, and mini activities occur over the event weekend, we realized that we could save time by pre-writing all known Slack announcements. We found this especially helpful when announcing the meal choices and ensuring all dietary restrictions are mentioned.
To kick it up a notch, there are also Slack integrations like Timy that allow scheduled messages to go out throughout the weekend.
Organizers get lost too!
Although the entire team takes part in putting together a hackathon, it is usually only the logistics team that knows how it will all play out. We created a schedule for everything we could think of, spanning sponsored workshops, meals, garbage sweeps, and more. We also included details such as the schedule item’s location, its “Boss”, as well as organizers/volunteers assigned to help out with said task.
Recall that many new organizers may have never attended your hackathon before. We included floor plans and diagrams wherever we could for quick reference and easy replicability!
After the hackathon 😴
Just when you thought you were done… you’re not!
Retrospectives
Debriefing is a great way to bond and discuss after the stressful weekend you spent the past year working on. One of the best ways to grow is by learning from previous experiences, and retrospectives allow for future teams to learn from us!
What the logistics team did this year was separate the hackathon into different categories (volunteers, food, pre-hackathon, workshops, etc.) and write notes under the columns: Good, Bad, and Future.
For big team retrospectives, we used an interactive presentation tool like Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter to let members submit their anonymized thoughts while discussing + documenting them in a quick and collaborative fashion.
A pro tip: You actually need to read through the previous years’ retrospectives for them to be useful, ie. keep them accessible for future organizers to read!
Any leftover documentation
As the final weeks before the hackathon will most likely pass in a blur, it is important to go through the documentation afterwards to ensure everything is complete. This includes receipts, finalized shopping lists and other miscellaneous notes. It is also a good time to add notes for issues that arose and how they were handled.
Thats a lot of docs! 😱
Now that you’ve made it to the end of this article, you are probably realizing that there’s a lot more to organizing a hackathon than, you know, just organizing it. My advice to save yourself from crunching at the very end would be to write docs as soon as knowledge comes in and do not procrastinate.
You want to build a hackathon that will outlive your time on the organization team, and the key is to document, document, document!
It’s worth it, I promise.
Words by Anita Tse, 2018/2019 nwHacks Logistics Director, 2019/2020 incoming nwPlus Co-President
Want to learn more about hackathon organization? Check out my other article on the Inner Workings of nwHacks 2019, where I discuss steps nwPlus took to facilitate an efficient and positive work culture while putting together Western Canada’s largest collegiate hackathon.
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