Takeaways from executing two of the largest online hackathons in the APAC

On April 12, We broke Hackathon history by executing the largest online hackathon in APAC to date: with almost 3,000 competitors, mentors and lead mentors- all within only 9 days using a shoestring budget and a total team of four. They did it again a couple of weeks ago, working with the Australian and New Zealand Defence Forces involving over 25 Defence organizations and industry partners.

Introduction

The motivation for #flattenthecurvehack and #anzdfhack

Like many of us, we see politicians, scientists and medical professionals racking their brains on how to solve and address some of the biggest problems the world is facing under this pandemic. 

However, my team thought: what we can the ordinary citizen do to help create a better society? Can we not tap into the innovation and creativity of thousands of software engineers, designers and business people to push us along?

The hackathon – what is it, the main objectives and benefits

A hackathon can be described as a “marathon of invention”. Anyone interested in ideating a solution for a specific challenge attends a hackathon to learn, build & share their creations over the course of typically 48-72 hours.

How it works

In a nutshell, during a hackathon team develop a project from scratch, demo it to judges, and win prizes! Another way to look at it is to compress the software development from development to deployment, in the span of one weekend.

 Challenges for this Virtual hackathon during COVID-19 period 

2,000+ participants from around the world

Managing 15 people in your team is difficult. If you’re a CEO, managing 1,000 people might be a challenge. In our case, with 2,700 completely new faces, from 13 different time zones presented its own challenges in the dissemination of information, competing categories, sponsorships, judging and of course the deadline of submissions. 

Different skills set & background (some are experienced professionals, some are fresh graduates, etc)

As countless articles on the web can read: diversity in any team produces more innovative, productive and engaged members, and this is exceptionally true when you have to build a team, ideat and ship a product in two days.

We ensured to the best of our ability diversity of skillset through our capture forms, to understand who and why mentors and competitors were participating, and to really understand and optimize the dynamics of team creation, mentor pairing and lead mentor groups.

According to Janson Lim, Chief Mentor Organiser ”we explicitly created lead mentor groups with diversity in age and industry, seniority while maintaining a very high level of hackathon experience requirement to encourage mentors to learn from each other, as much as the teams were learning from the mentors themselves.”

Most participants do not know each other – teams are formed online (with strangers)

The saying “you don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression” holds true in all settings, but it is especially important online. Building and forming a trust is the bedrock of successful team-building and there were many tips and tricks that we employed behind the scenes. Some of the most successful experiments we executed were

Creating private channels for teams based on an internal algorithm for ideal team creation

Cross-pollinating data from different channels to give meaningful and interesting resources and requests more visibility to other competitors.

Innovative use of IT for a virtual hackathon

Being a completely virtual hackathon presents its own challenges and perks. Sure, you don’t get the irreplaceable face to face interaction in your team and mentor, and there isn’t free food to eat. But as long as you have rock-solid software, a passionate heart, then you can overcome anything, Most importantly: the event, despite having some incredible technological minds involved, doesn’t need to use complex and feature-rich software.. In many ways; the key fundamentals of effective communication, private rooms to ideate, and access to qualified mentors and resources are key. To this end, we used:

1. Youtube’s free Livestream service to broadcast the opening ceremony and judging awards.
2. Slack as the primary communication channel, with the pro version generously supported by Slack APAC.
3. Simple, cloud-based applications for workplace collaboration (Google forms, Trello)
4. Linkedin, Twitter for marketing and social media activity
5. And Zoom for webinars, mentor inductions, and workshops for our competitors.

Lessons learned

Both #FlattentheCurve and #ANZDFHack varied in their challenge scope, audience size, and processes. In each case, our team was able to rapidly ideate, deploy and iterate on new resources, induction methods and timelines on the audience: Which yielded amazing results.

Lesson #1: For IT: Simple is best.

It goes without saying how reliant we are on the basics of IT systems in our day-to-day life, but that is a conversation for a different day. The key lesson we learnt was that as much as hackathon bespoke solutions exist in the market, you don’t need a great deal to execute a high-quality experience: only qualified people in the driver’s seat.

Lesson #2: Teams can work it out

Participants are not children who need direction and guidance from a parent. Many are smart students, managers and passionate individuals who do not need the top-down pressure to remain motivated to ideate the next best solution. Channeling that energy is all that an organizer needs to do: any more and the experience may start to spoil.

Lesson #3: Mentoring is critical

In this same vein: Mentors are not micro-managers who need to timebox or patronize their peers. All that true innovation requires for mentors is light-touch deep expertise in challenge areas and a safety net for when cr*p hits the fan.

Lesson #4: Under pressure, diamonds can form

There is a reason why hackathons are short and provide some of the most effective value to time ratios for any organization to begin the process of innovation. With a perfect mix of global anxiety, restlessness, incredible expertise and passion, this created some of the most amazing products that our organization has seen. From 3D printed helmets to children's education tools, our team was astounded by the level of thought and care put into their works.

The Global AI Hackathon #BuildwithAI 24th July 2020

The Global AI Hackathon (#BuildwithAI) is an opportunity for builders to create AI solutions that drive social impact, with the aim of tackling some of the challenges related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The theme is “emergence” to help society emerge stronger in a post-COVID-19 world.

We’re encouraging the builders around the world to use AI and other technologies of your choice across a range of suggested themes and challenge areas. The hackathon welcomes locally and globally focused solutions and is open to all developers.

Collaborate, Sponsor, Mentor or participate here: www.BuildwithAI.com