Hackathon was something that we had discussed for a long time and thought that it would be a nice event to arrange. I noticed that hackathon as an idea has been implemented in many forms but the one we used was borrowed from Atlassian. The idea was to give people 24 hours, no guidelines or boundaries besides the rule that one should present the results to the audience.
As this was the first time ever, we wanted to first check that is there even any interest for this kind of thing. We created an idea bank where people could 'deposit' their ideas on what they thought would be cool to try. When we had around ten ideas it was clear that we would do this thing.
Behind the scenes we set up a Hackathon Confluence space. It hosted an environment for people to register their team. Also it was a great way to arrange the electronic voting. Our technology unit head was already very much involved, but we wanted to get also our CEO as a sponsor and guardian for the event. After all, that's also a good way to guarantee that people are confident on spending their time for this kind of event and no-one will book meetings or customer visits for that day. When everything was clear, we announced the date and sent out invitation to everyone.
There were some necessary purchases to do before the grand day. For timing the demos (we had decided that each team would get a five minute slot to show what they had made) I wanted to get a Time timer. I saw one of those in a training and understood how simple yet brilliant the idea is. It's very easy to visualize how much time you have left with this little buddy.
Then we of course needed something to keep the people awake if they wanted to pull an all-nighter. Our company is not so big and I wasn't really sure how many participants we would get, so I got as ~50 Battery energy drinks.
And because everyone (should) know the Ballmer peak and we wanted to get awesome hacking results, we needed some alcoholic beverages.
Finally we wanted people to be constantly aware of the coming event, so we replaced our normal wall mounted status display with a countdown. It was very hard NOT to know when the Hackathon would start!
On the Hackathon morning we had a very short briefing about the rules. As stated already, there were no restrictions regarding the topics. Only rule was that you should be able to demonstrate the results the next morning, in a maximum of five minute demo. Presenting failure would be also very much acceptable, since when you ride a rocket, predicting the precise landing spot can be tricky. ;)
When the 24 hour time started rolling our idea bank had grown tremendously. We had almost 30 different ideas! And the number of teams was also astonishing. If I remember correctly we had 15 teams, some consisting of only a single person, but teams anyway.
During the day the ideas got developed. We ordered some pizza for the hungry people just tried to root for everyone. It's worth mentioning that also people who were not themselves participating were very supportive for all the hackers.
As this was the first time, I didn't really expect people to stay up all night, but some teams did some late night coding. There were some hilarious pictures taken in the office during some very non-standard office hours. :)
When the next morning came, we had set up our demo environment. When the countdown reached zero, we started right away with the first demonstration.
The demonstrations were really high quality. It was really eye opening for people to see how much can be achieved in 24 hours when skilled and motivated people give their best. It is a huge potential that doesn't always get fully blooming. This is something to really pay attention to more.
As the master of ceremony I was really strict with this five minute rule. When the Time timer beeped, I started applauding. With some people the running out of time took them by a surprise, but almost everyone managed to present their ideas and results in time. It was clear that people had understood the idea that 'only the demo counts'.
Even though there were plenty of people physically present in our headquarters, we wanted to have electronic voting. We are a global company with multiple offices so it did felt like the right thing to do. We had ten minutes for the voting and then we announced the winners. They received the challenge cup, some personal rewards and of course awesome bragging rights for winning our first ever Hackathon. By the way, here's a picture of the cup:
