Comments on: How to plan a hackfest

By: davidbaer

davidbaer — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 23:50:25 +0000

There’s a movement to radically change California government, by getting rid of career politicians and chopping their salaries in half. A group known as Citizens for California Reform wants to make the California legislature a part time time job, just like it was until 1966.
http://www.onlineuniversalwork.com

By: Brenda

Brenda — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:30:08 +0000

(p.s. some info on the many hackfests in New Zealand can be found at http://shdh.org.nz/ )

By: Brenda

Brenda — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:09:13 +0000

I’ve organised so many hackfests, i’ve lost count.. something approaching 60 per year. (yes, > 1 per week)…
you must organise extremely kickass awesome hackfest, but i wanted to add that you don’t need to do all these things. Most of the hackfests the effort is mostly in the advertising and the reminding of geeks “are you going to the hackfest tomorrow” .. “oh yeah, i forgot”.. geeks suck at calendaring.
But for one or two of the events all I did was say “my lounge at 1pm on Saturday”.
For most hackfests I just book the venue, advertise, and people show up. I get there 30 minutes before with my giant box of power boards and extension cables. sometimes there’s a sponsor bartab/foodtab (and invoicing to do) but generally organising a hackfest has become very easy.

By: Benjamin Otte

Benjamin Otte — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:01:09 +0000

You didn’t talk about duration. From my experience, hackfests should be at least 2 full days, but not more than 5. I think the ideal duration is 4 days (which is what I scheduled for the video hackfest). Less than 2 days is bad, because the overhead for getting to know each other and sharing the latest stories is too big. And after 5 days of hacking, discussing and learning new things, I am so tired that i just want to stop thinking. So my productivity goes way down after that.
An important thing about hackfests that probably deserves a whole post on its own is the size. Even with 2 persons you can have the advantages of a hackfest, so there’s no minimum size limit. But it’s usually a good idea to limit the number to a size that works as a single group. Because if you are 8 or less, it’s easy to have a discussion involving everyone or find a pub where everyone fits in. The Cairo hackfest last year (I think we were 6?) was a very good example for such a hackfest IMO.
If you want to bring people from a lot of projects together, you can make the hackfest bigger, because you expect to have multiple discussions going on at the same time. In that case, it’s likely a good idea to have multiple rooms available, so that people don’t interrupt each other. You also need to exercicse a bit more planning to keep people focussed. In any case, I’d not make it more than 20 people, because it feels more like a conference in that case and the hacking or “get stuff done” mentality gets lost. At least that was my complaint about the GTK hackfest. A hackfest that got the bigger scope right was the FOMS meeting I attended this year – we were 14 people there.
And of course, you should have written this a month earlier when I was still planning the video hackfest and had no clue what to do. It would have been very helpful to have this article – maybe put in into the wiki somewhere?

By: Eitan

Eitan — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:54:20 +0000

Bookmarked! Thanks for this writeup, I’ll be using this.