How to Run a Virtual Hackathon
There’s a long tradition of hackathons, which are short sprints that bring people together to design and produce radical new solutions in a finite time period. Companies, nonprofits, and government agencies have hosted dozens of folks in a conference room or thousands of folks at a meeting facility, plied them with free food and beverages, and set them off for typically 24 hours or for a few days to see what solutions they can come up with.
Less common are virtual hackathons (although they do happen!). But in this time when large face-to-face gatherings are discouraged due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many groups are turning to on-line platforms to accomplish similar goals over similar timeframes.
Over 24 hours on April 30 and May 1, the d.school’s K12 Lab ran its first-ever hacK12athon, which brought together more than 100 students, educators, designers, parents, and community members to collectively ideate, build, test, and share prototypes in response to pressing concerns facing K12 students, educators, and families during COVID-19. We got a ton of things totally right, and as is the case when prototyping and experimenting, we also had our fair share of things that didn’t quite work out. So here, we present to you plans for how you might run your own hackathon (or, more precisely, how we’d do it if we had a time machine and a chance for a do-over).
At least a month in advance …
- KNOW YOUR WHY It will be a LOT of work to pull off a successful virtual hackathon; before you get started, have a very clear sense of why you’re taking it on. Is it to activate a community? Is it to surface new ideas? Is it to help build connections between those who don’t typically end up in the same room? Some combination? Just be really clear why you’re taking this on, and what success looks like.
- RECRUIT PARTICIPANTS Decide how many participants you can accommodate, and the process to choose them if you get more interest than you can handle. Will there be an application? Will it be first come, first served? Note that you might have significant drop-off (especially if the event is free), with folks who sign up and then when the date approaches, they find out they have other commitments. A good rule of thumb is that you might have about 30–40% attrition rate (for the hacK12thon, we had about 200 folks sign up, and about 120 actually participate). Also, think about the diversity you hope to have in the virtual room, and determine a strategy to recruit those who might be harder to get into the room.
- BE PREPARED FOR A DIFFERENT SET OF PARTICIPANTS With a virtual hackathon, you might get folks from around the world, and may have participants who couldn’t otherwise travel to an in-person meeting (e.g., we had middle-school students join us at the hacK12athon). Consider how your agenda can accommodate folks from dozens of time zones, and folks with different degrees of experience as designers.
- DO THE EMPATHY WORK In a traditional hackathon, you might have end users in the room to help the hackathon participants learn about needs and build empathy. In a virtual setting, this may or may not be possible. You may need to do the empathy work in advance and provide key take-aways to the participants.
A week in advance …
- PREPARE PARTICIPANTS Try to avoid bombarding the hackathon participants with too many e-mails; it’s easy for the key information to get lost. See if you can get away with one e-mail that has all the key information (like the purpose, the timing, links to where they need to be when, any software they need to download or prep work they need to do.) For example, if they need to use a new collaboration platform (like Mural), you might invite them to watch a short video on how to use the platform.
- PREPARE THE FACILITATORS You might want to have one facilitator per hackathon team; and if so, you, might have a huge army of folks who need to get on the same page. Plan time to go through the agenda, the tools, and expectations for what needs to happen when.
- PLAN SOCIAL MEDIA If you plan to use social media for your event, make sure to start circulating hashtags and media for others to use.
The day before …
- REMIND EVERYONE The hackathon participants have lots of other things on their minds, so send reminders about when and where they should meet tomorrow. If there’s any prep they need to do, you might also prompt them about that as well.
The day(s) of …
- GET THERE EARLY Have the facilitators log in at least an hour before the official kick-off to do a tech check, and to review the run of show for the day.
- COMMUNICATION CHANNELS Set up a text chain or a special Slack channel or e-mail chain for the facilitators so they can communicate with one another outside of the virtual meeting platform.
- EASE FOLKS IN You’ll never know what else is going on in folks’ lives, so provide a chance to transition into hackathon mode. Play music, have folks introduce themselves in the chat, and facilitate some energizing stokes.
- USE NAMES If you plan to have participants work in smaller virtual break-out rooms, you might ask them to change their screen names to include their group or room assignment (e.g., “Group 17 — Lin-Manuel Miranda”). This way, when it comes time to move folks to their rooms (or if they accidentally log out and need to rejoin) you can easily get them where they need to go.
- TECHNOLOGY WILL FAIL Assume that at least some folks will have problems logging into the platform, will lose their connection, or need to download necessary software. Keep one person in the “main room” of your meeting platform to deal with these problems; if someone in a breakout room has challenges, it’s easier to have them exit back to the main room to get help instead of having the breakout room facilitator try to also provide tech support.
- LESS TALK, MORE DO In online environments, there are limits to how long individuals can stay focused on talking heads. When face-to-face it’s logistically easier to do 10-minute mini-lectures, move folks to groups, and then summon them back to share or for more guidance. In an online platform, it can be a different set of challenges to move folks back and forth. So figure out the least amount of time you need to share information, and try to chunk it to minimize the transition time. (For a copy of the facilitation deck from the hacK12athon, please click here.)
- USE COLLABORATION TOOLS In a traditional hackathon, white boards and sticky notes are often the tools of the trade. You might consider what are the virtual versions; for our hacK12athon, we used Mural as a platform where folks could brainstorm together virtually. (Link to our templates can be found here).
- BUT HAVE BACKUP COLLABORATION TOOLS Despite all best intentions, something might not work for some folks, so consider your contingency plans. You might have a Google Doc ready to go, just in case, or have an analog tool that you can quickly take a photo of and send around.
- BE READY TO SHIFT PLANS Sure, you’ve planned this for weeks, but something will take way more time (pro tip: it will never be way less time). So you may need to radically cut short some planned activity or part of the process.
- PREPARE TO SHARE In many ways, the payoff for a hackathon is the chance to share what you created with the other participants to get feedback and to celebrate. But if you have hundreds of participants, it can be a challenge to figure out how to do so. One idea is to have teams create a finite set of slides (e.g., 2 or 3) that summarize their solution on a common template to make the process efficient. (To see the slides that were created as part of the hacK12athon, please check out this link.)
- DETERMINE LICENSING Make sure to clarify ownership of the hacks; you might decide to have the hacks be licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC BY-SA 2.0), which allows the creators to maintain ownership, but grant others permission to use and adapt the hack, so long as they provide credit to the licensor, and any derivative works are shared with the same license.
- GO OUT WITH A BANG Think about how you’ll call the event to a close. One idea is some ceremonial ending (like a virtual pinning ceremony to honor each other as designers). Another idea might be to have some folks who might benefit from the solutions join to react and respond to the hacks that are created (e.g., if your hackathon is focussed on solutions for rural students, have a panel of such students there to authentically join in to celebrate the work).
The days after …
- MAKE SURE THINGS DON’T SIT ON SHELVES To honor the hard work and effort of your hackathon participants, make sure that their ideas get out into the world. Make sure they have access to all of the ideas, but then also plan how to get their prototypes into the hands of those who can take them to the next level.
- EXPRESS GRATITUDE Thank your team for going above and beyond. Thank the participants for offering their time and energy to help solve problems together. Thank whatever technology higher powers kept the whole thing from crashing down.
It’s possible that even when we can return to our workplaces, and when face-to-face hackathons are again possible, it might be worthwhile to continue to hold either entirely or partially virtual versions. We found that our hackathon allowed many more and a greater range of folks to participate — in some cases folks who would never have been able to afford the time and travel costs to come to the Stanford d.school — which helps us to achieve our social justice goals of diversity and inclusion.
If you try your own virtual hackathon, please let us know what you learn!
