How to organize a hackathon as a student 101. Part one

Hello everyone, already several times I ran across articles about hackathons: why people go there, what works, what doesn't. Perhaps people will be interested to hear about the hackathons from the other side: from the side of the organizer. Please note that this is 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 suffer), I personally participated in 6 hackathons, including the one that will be discussed now. All the events were attended by me personally, so there is a bit of subjectivity. On the hackathon in question, I was a participant 2 times and an organizer once. He is called IC Hack, created by volunteer students and ate 70-80 hours of my free time this year. Here is the project site and a few photos.


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Hackatons are usually organized either by companies (here the size of the company itself does not matter) or by universities. In the first case, there are fewer questions on the organization. Sponsorship is provided by the company itself, usually an agency is hired to organize an event (sometimes the employees themselves are involved in the organization at 100%), the jury is recruited from the staff and often given the topic for which the project is proposed. It’s quite another thing that is university hackathons, which are also divided into two categories. The first is of interest to small universities with little experience in holding such events. They are organized through MLH (Major League Hacking), which takes responsibility for almost the entire process.

It is MLH that deals with sponsorship, takes most of the seats on the jury and teaches students how to conduct hackathons in the process. Examples of such events can be HackCity, Royal Hackaway and others. The main plus in stability. All hakatons organized in this way are very similar to each other, they all follow the same scenario, have similar sponsors and do not require special preparation from students conducting these events. The disadvantages are obvious: the events are not very different from each other down to the prize categories. Another minus is the small amount of funding (from the official site of Royal Hackaway 2018, you can see that the gold sponsor brings them 1500 GBP) and a very meager choice of “swag” (free merch 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 within 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, the “hipster” teams are not very hard to stand out against their background.

PS Tickets are almost always free, we consider it a bad tone to sell a ticket for a hackathon.



Now, when I briefly talked about alternatives, let us return to the main topic of the post: hackathons organized by independent enthusiastic students. To begin with, who are these students, and what is the actual profit of the organization of such an event? Most of these people themselves are frequent participants of hakatons, they know what works well and what is not, and want a hakaton with preference and an ideal experience for its participants. The main advantage here is in experience, including personal participation / victories in other hackathons. Age and experience range from 1 bachelor course to 3 PhD courses. The 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 far as possible. Now a more interesting question: how do you manage to organize an event comparable in scale to hackathons held by industry giants (JP Morgan Hack-for-Good, Facebook Hack London is one of those hackathons I attended personally, and there was a tremendous organizational work done )?



Let's start with the first obvious problem: the budget. A small spoiler: the organization of such events even in your own university (where the rent is small / absent) 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 small 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 profit for companies? Why do they want to invest in this event? Hiring new prospective staff. In our case, 420 participants, which is a record for the UK. Of these, 75% are students of Imperial College (at the moment the university is number 8 in the world rankings).

Many companies practice summer / year internships for students and this is a great chance to find people who already have the experience and desire to work in this industry. As our president said: why overpay 8000 for 2-3 potential candidates to recruit agencies, when you can pay 2000 to us for 20 new candidates directly? The rates depend on the size of the hackathon, the reputation of the organizers and many other factors. Ours start from 1000 GBP for small startups, and go up to 10.000 GBP for the main sponsor. What exactly sponsors get is entirely dependent on how much they are willing to offer: bronze sponsors will receive a logo on the site, an opportunity to speak at the opening, access to a summary of all participants and the opportunity to send us their merch that we will distribute to participants. All statuses starting from silver make it possible to send their engineers to recruit on the spot, creating their own prize category, a workshop for participants with a bonus to all bronze perks. From personal experience, I can say that one of the companies of the silver level recruited 3 people (2 for the summer and one for a permanent position) right during the hackathon, and I didn’t even consider how many they could hire after they were sent out. 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 question in the most creative way (for example, Most Ethical Hack powered by Visa). Depends on the company. Every year we collect 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 you have to refuse a sponsor because our students have not given the best reviews about the practice / permanent job in this company, then we will most likely refuse.



How do we find sponsors? This process is worthy of a small article, but here’s a quick algorithm: find a recruiter on LinkedIn / find a person with a contact in this company; coordinate with the organizers committee how large a company is, how good is its reputation (we try not to work with those who have a bad reputation in student circles, whether it is related to the trainees or trying to save on their salary) and who will be the main point of contact. This is followed by a long debate about how much a given company can offer us and a commercial offer is sent to it. We have a very flexible system of sponsorship and therefore negotiations can take a lot of time: the sponsor must understand what he is paying 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 will agree on the amount with the university, sign a contract and invite them to the organizers' meeting to discuss exactly what they want to receive from the event and how exactly they want to advertise themselves to the students. There are cases when companies paid less than 3000 GBP and received a dozen potential employees for full-fledged employment after graduation.



Why do we need this money? Are they up to 3,000 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 48 hours) and not so much (waffles, bubble tea, rent of consoles, three-hour bar rent, karaoke, etc.) things. We try to make everyone remember the event only with good things, so we buy a ton of delicious food (Nandos, Dominos, Pret a Manger), a huge amount of snacks and drinks, and every year we add new entertainment. This year I roasted popcorn for 500 people, in the past I made cotton candy. The budget for this, keeping in mind the 420 participants, 50 organizers and 60 sponsors can easily pass for 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, thermomugs, backpacks and a ton of other things useful in the household. Given the scale, you can easily spend a few thousand more. Despite the fact that we spend IC Hack on the campus, we pay for 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 expenses that many do not think about. Most of the prize categories are invented by us and the prizes are selected and bought by us too (about this in the next part). This time, the budget for the prizes has exceeded 7000 GBP. I can not give the exact amount, but I will say that this year the costs easily exceeded 60.000 GBP. Here are the photos of the winners.



Money collected, budget agreed, prizes and food ordered. What's next? Pile hell and sodomy, also known as site preparation. All this beauty begins 2 months before the hackathon. A huge amount of furniture should be moved, the risk of assessments filled, loading 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 the topic for the next article.



This is the first part of my story about the organization of IC Hack. If there is enough interest, I will release 2 more parts about the main problems and blocks in organizing the site itself and tell you a little about the prizes, categories and experience of sponsors, organizers and participants (including BBC live coverage from the scene). If you are interested in learning about IC Hack in more detail, please email me du216@ic.ac.uk, or if you are interested in sponsoring the largest hackathon in the UK, then welcome. I return to the headquarters of the organizers one more time.