Hello everyone, I’ve already come across articles about hackathons several times: why people go there, what works, what doesn’t. Perhaps people will be interested to hear about hackathons from the other side: from the side of the organizer. Please note that we are talking about the UK, the organizers from Russia may have a slightly different opinion on this matter.
A small background: I am a 3rd year student at Imperial College London, a programmer, I have been living here for 7 years (the quality of the Russian text could have suffered), I personally participated in 6 hackathons, including the one that will be discussed now. All events were attended by me personally, so there is a bit of subjectivity. At the hackathon in question, I was a participant 2 times and an organizer 1 time. It's called the IC Hack, created by student volunteers, and has eaten up 70-80 hours of my free time this year. and a few photos.
Hackathons are usually organized either by companies (here the size of the company itself does not play a role) or by universities. In the first case, there are noticeably fewer questions about organization. Sponsorship is provided by the company itself, usually an agency is hired to organize the event (sometimes the employees themselves organize 100% of the organization), the jury is recruited from employees and often a topic is given on which it is proposed to make a project. A completely different matter is university hackathons, which are also divided into two categories. The first is of interest to smaller universities with little experience in hosting such events. They are organized through MLH (Major League Hacking), which takes responsibility for almost the entire process.
It is MLH that sponsors, takes most of the seats on the jury and teaches students how to conduct hackathons in the process. Examples of such events are HackCity, Royal Hackaway and others. The main advantage is stability. All hackathons organized in this way are very similar to each other, they all follow the same scenario, have similar sponsors and do not require special training from students conducting these events. The disadvantages are obvious: the events do not differ much from each other up to the prize categories. Another minus is the small amount of funding (from the official website of Royal Hackaway 2018 you can see that the gold sponsor brings them 1500 GBP) and a very poor selection of swag (free merchandise brought by sponsoring companies). From my own experience, I can say that such events are not very large in size, are friendly to beginners and you can almost always get tickets for them (I thought to go or not for 3 days, but even half of the tickets were not sold) and they very often have similar competing teams (70-80% of all projects are related to web applications). Therefore, it is not very difficult for hipster teams to stand out from their background.
PS Tickets are almost always free, we consider it bad manners to sell a ticket to a hackathon.
Now that I've briefly talked about the alternatives, let's get back to the main topic of the post: hackathons organized by independent student enthusiasts. To begin with, who are these students, and what is the actual profit of organizing such an event? Most of these people are frequent hackathon participants themselves, they know what works well and what doesn’t, and they want a hackathon with preference and an ideal experience for its participants. The main advantage here is experience, including personal participation / victories in other hackathons. Age and experience range from 1st year Bachelor to 3rd year PhD. Faculties are also different: there are biochemists, but for the most part they are students of programmers. In our case, the official team consisted of 20 people, but in fact we had another 20-25 volunteers who helped with small assignments as much as possible. Now a more interesting question: how is it possible to organize an event on a scale comparable to the hackathons held by the giants of the industry (JP Morgan Hack-for-Good, Facebook Hack London - these are some of those hackathons that I personally attended, and colossal organizational work was done there )?
Let's start with the first obvious problem: the budget. Minor spoiler: organizing such events even at your own university (where the rent is low / non-existent) can easily cost 50.000 GBP and it is very difficult to find such an amount. The main source of this money is sponsors. They can be both internal (other university communities that want to advertise and recruit new members) and corporate. The process with internal sponsors is quite simple: acquaintances, professors and tutors who administer these communities. Unfortunately, their budget is low and in some cases represents services (place snacks in their closet, borrow a 3D printer, etc.) instead of money. Therefore, it remains to hope for corporate sponsorship. What is the benefit for companies? Why do they want to invest in this event? Hiring new promising staff. In our case, 420 participants, which is a record for the UK. Of these, 75% are students of the Imperial College (currently the number 8 university in the world rankings).
A lot of companies practice summer / year internships for students and this is a great chance to find people who already have experience and a desire to work in this industry. As our president said: why overpay recruiting agencies 8000 for 2-3 potential candidates, when you can pay us 2000 for 20 new candidates directly? Prices depend on the size of the hackathon, the reputation of the organizers and many other factors. Ours start at 1000 GBP for small startups and go up to 10.000 GBP for a main sponsor. What exactly sponsors receive depends entirely on how much they are willing to offer: bronze sponsors will receive a logo on the site, the opportunity to speak at the opening, access to the resumes of all participants and the opportunity to send us their merchandise so that we distribute it to the participants. All statuses starting from silver make it possible to send your engineers to recruit them right on the spot, create your own prize category, workshop for participants with a bonus to all bronze perks. From personal experience, I can say that one of the silver level companies recruited 3 people (2 for the summer and one for a permanent position) right during the hackathon, and I didn’t even count how many they could still hire after the mailing after the end. Creating your own prize category allows you to find those who make projects similar to the company's products. Or see who can answer a very open-ended question in the most creative way (Most Ethical Hack powered by Visa for example). Depends on the company. Every year we gather 15-20 sponsors, including Facebook, Microsoft, Cisco, Bloomberg and others. We work with everyone: from startups to industry giants, the main rule is profit for our students. If we have to refuse a sponsor because our students left not the best reviews about the practice/permanent work in this company, then we will most likely refuse.
How do we find sponsors? This is a process worthy of a short article, but here is a short algorithm: find a recruiter on LinkedIn / find a person with a contact in this company; agree with the organizing committee how large the company is, how good its reputation is (we try not to work with those who have a bad reputation in student circles, whether it’s treating interns or trying to save on their salaries) and who will be the main point of contact. This is followed by a long debate about how much this company can offer us and a commercial offer is sent to it. We have a very flexible sponsorship system and therefore negotiations can take a very long time: the sponsor must understand what he pays for and therefore we reserve the right to add / remove some items from the proposal if the sponsor believes that they will not bring much profit to the company. After negotiations, we agree on the amount with the university, sign a contract and invite them to the meeting of the organizers to discuss what exactly they want to get from the event and how exactly they want to advertise themselves to students. There are cases where companies paid less than 3000 GBP and received a dozen potential employees for full-time employment after graduation.
What do we need this money for? Are you snickering or something to demand 3000 for sponsorship? In fact, this is a very modest amount by the standards of the event. Money is needed for a huge amount of necessary (lunch x2, snacks, dinner x2, pizza, breakfast and drinks for all 48 hours) and not so much (waffles, bubble tea, rent of consoles, three-hour rent of a bar, karaoke, etc.) things. We try to make sure that everyone remembers the event with only good things, so we stock a ton of delicious food (Nandos, Dominos, Pret a Manger), a huge amount of snacks and drinks, and add new entertainment every year. This year I roasted popcorn for 500 people, last year I made cotton candy. The budget for this, keeping in mind 420 participants, 50 organizers and 60 sponsors, could easily exceed 20.000 GBP.
And there is also electricity, security, prizes (very good by student standards: PS4 for example) for all team members. And this is a maximum of 5 people per minute. This is followed by “swag” from sponsors and from us. T-shirts, thermal mugs, backpacks and a ton of other household items. Given the scale, you can easily spend a few thousand more. Even though we run IC Hack on campus, we pay rent. Less than a third party company, but still. Plus the cost of cooks for lunch (the university forbids lunch on its own, and who knows why), renting a projector (since its cost is several times higher than the cost of the hackathon itself) and other costs that many do not think about. Most of the prize categories were invented by us and the prizes are selected and bought by us too (more on that in the next part). This time the budget for prizes exceeded 7000 GBP. I can't name the exact amount, but I will say that this year the costs easily exceeded 60.000 GBP. Here are the photos of the winners.
The money has been collected, the budget has been agreed, prizes and food have been ordered. What's next? Pitch hell and sodomy, also known as site preparation. All this beauty begins 2 months before the hackathon. Huge amounts of furniture have to be moved, risk assessments completed, shipments received, plans signed, and so on. The list is huge. That is why we call a huge number of volunteers to help us in the organization process. And even they are not always enough. But this is a topic for the next article.
This is the first part of my story about the IC Hack organization. If there is enough interest, I will release 2 more parts about the main problems and blocks in organizing the site itself and talk a little about the prizes, categories and experience of sponsors, organizers and participants (including a BBC live report from the event). If you are interested in learning more about IC Hack, please email me [email protected], or if you are interested in sponsoring the biggest hackathon in the UK, then you are welcome. I return to the headquarters of the organizers one more time.
Source: habr.com