The term "hackathon" today in the IT-community did not hear, probably, only lazy. The fact that this is a "beast", they know a little less of market participants. And even fewer people actually took part in hackathons and can be proud of having survived in their harsh realities. But what are the internal hackathons of companies, ordinary developers almost do not know. In this sense, only a few specialists were lucky, in whose companies such events were held.

We want to talk about what an internal hackathon is and how best to organize this momentous event. And believe it, it will surely become a landmark in the life of your company. Our experience in conducting internal hackathons resulted in a set of tips, which we called the “Rule of five“ no ”.”



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"It is impossible" to hackathon on their own

That is possible, of course, but if you do not want this to be the first and last hackathon in your company, then you should contact those who have experience in holding such events. Organizing a hackathon is a complex process that involves working with participants, teaching them the art of presenting their own ideas, preparing speeches. You will need to do logistics, catering, buying the necessary office.
We conduct our hackathons together with old friends - “Mikhail Kechinov Studio”, which organizes a series of events HackDay. It is clear that you need to lay a certain budget for this, but the quality of the event will definitely increase. You can read about their view on the organization of external hakatons here .

It is necessary to pay attention to any, even prescriptive, trifles, because you will have only one chance to make the hackathon incendiary, memorable, and, most importantly, useful for employees. And if the first pancake is lumpy, then the second time no one will come to you.

"It is impossible" to motivate employees with expensive prizes

Hackathon is not a competition. The point is not in luring specialists from a project to a project, but in the possibility of cooperation between participants from different teams. The more engineers communicate while working on joint projects, the more favorable is the climate at the site, and therefore in the working groups after the hackathon. Therefore, not personalized, but team prizes are important. They should be inexpensive, but always aimed at team-time: multi-level challenging puzzles, millions of puzzles, chess, radio-controlled toys and all the cute stuff that is designed for the team. No expensive devices should become a lure to participate in the hackathon; if a person is counting on it, he is not for you.

The role of the right motivation, like the marketing of the hackathon itself, is so great that, perhaps, this is the main thing that you need to think about from the very beginning. How to attract people? With a properly built chain of "promotion", everything will benefit the cause: and creative advertising banners pasted everywhere in the office; and the “warming-up” warm-up event, which is usually held 1-2 weeks before the hackathon.





At EMC, we conduct a series of brainstorming sessions (innovative manifestos), and we urge you to bring to the hackathon all the generating ideas, assemble a team and work on creating a prototype. This is one of the types of motivation that we use.
An example is the idea of ​​Andrei Pakhomov, head of the development team of the EMC Research Center in Skolkovo. He proposed to make a "lightweight" system for the collaboration of scientific communities. Here is how he himself describes it: “We solved the problem of managing, storing and exchanging scientific data. The architecture is based on popular and reliable OSS solutions. Thanks to their use, our functionality is a fairly small level of management, potentially scalable to any needs. In principle, the system can be used not only for scientific projects, but also for any tasks that require data management, including search and analytics. ” This idea was born during the innovation manifesto, on the nearest hackathon it turned into a working prototype.

But this does not mean that the matter does not go further than the hakaton. We invite employees to contribute their ideas to the annual corporate Innovation Roadmap - an internal competition program to collect innovative ideas. And here it’s not the foggy searchlights that are going to, but the elaborated prototypes that have passed the fire-water-and-copper pipes of the hackathon, so that the hackathon helps someone to become a winner also at the corporate level. This is the second type of motivation in our company. And, of course, there is a third reason why employees come to the hackathon - it's a fan.

"Can't" underestimate comfort

Hackathon - the event is long and continuous. Usually, their duration is 48 hours, and for the second year we have been doing 35-hour hackathons (Friday-Saturday). For the comfort of the participants, it is not enough just convenient bin-begs, we need full-fledged sleeping bags, and more comfortable and more. We also learned this truth from our own experience.

"It is impossible" to forget about the feedback from the experts

Why do employees come to the internal hackathon? Work out your ideas. Have fun. And, most importantly, get feedback on the presented prototypes. Do not limit the participants in the "types" of ideas. These can be both tasks that teams or customers need to solve today, as well as ideas that lie outside of your business.

Everything is also important here: from nominating the jury to organizing mandatory personal feedback from each jury member for each project! The role of the moderator of the discussion during the meeting of the jury is also important, which should ensure that all valuable comments are voiced and not a single draft is ignored.

The composition of the jury should be diverse, it is necessary to include representatives of various departments, not only engineering, but also business, and sales, and development. Feedback should be versatile.

And the last: “it is impossible” to consider that there is no life after the hackathon

Quite the contrary: the success of the prototypes developed during the hackathon largely depends on the further implementation of projects, on how well you can help the participants show their project to the right people in the company, whether the project will receive investments for further development, or the results of the work can be implemented into the product . Of course, further there will be patent applications, incubation of ideas, and attraction of investments within the company, but this is a completely different story.