- Would you be up for participating again and if yes, when would be a good place and time of the year for you?
yes. no particular time of year. place anywhere reachable from Berlin – I guess that includes most of europe!
- Which things did you think we got right and which ones could do with a lot more improvement in your opinion?
[this is the website strand; I think kiderwind went somewhat differently]
Good:
- great location. lots of space
- 2 days is about the perfect length of time
- good balance of participants
- friendly, non-competitive atmosphere
- decent attempt at documenting what we did
- real, and largely successful, attempt to involve "non-technical" participants
- we chose objectives of about the right size. i.e. things that it made sense for us to do in 2 days
Bad:
- I was (one) track co-ordinator for the website strand, and substantially screwed it up. I didn't have a very clear idea of what I should have been doing in that role, and didn't have enough experience either with the community or the platform to guide things. So the session muddled along without much guidance or direction.
- The timing was very unclear. The dates were only clarified a couple of weeks before the event. I very nearly didn't come because I couldn't commit to a week-long event (as it was advertised). Then we had a day between the hackathon and LOTE -- which some people treated as extra hackathon and others didn't. So there was lots of unfocused hanging-around.
- There wasn't any wrap-up. We should have come back together at the end, shown what we'd done, praised each other, etc.
- Would you be interested in contributing to organising a harmonious hackathon and if so around what task/project/theme?
I’d love to take part in a hackathon around writing something – book sprints would be an inspiration here. It can involve a lot more people than a purely technical hackathon, and can break down well into small tasks. e.g. imagine if edgeryders got a gig preparing some report, and we (at least partly) wrote it through hackathon-style collaboration.
For more technical hackathons: I’ve also proposed hack necromancy as a theme. I’d also be interested in anything else, provided it has a well-specified and plausible objective. I’m much more interested in hackathons to continue an ongoing project, rather than always trying to build something new.