You all know that I love Hack Days. I even got involved in organising a Hack Day (HackCamp1 @ Google) at the beginning of the year. September was a bit interesting though, with 3 Hack Days in a row – MusicHackDay, Over The Air, and CharityHack.

It got me talking with some people about some of the problems we see that are solved in some events and ignored in others. This is my attempt to plot some of them down for others to read and comment on. In order of descending importance:

A Hack Day should promote teamwork

PayPal introduced a new concept at CharityHack last year. Instead of having a prize per winning team, they had a prize per winning team member (with a max of 4 team members per team). Now, I fully understand there are a few reasons why PayPal did this: they have a lot more money than most Hack Day organisers do, and they want to send up to 4 people to their conference in San Francisco.

The great thing though is that this promotes team work. At many Hack Days I see people work mainly in pairs or alone, because we all know it’s a pain if you are in a team of 5 and you win ONE prize. Who is taking it home, who will eBay it, who put in the most effort in the hack, etc. I worked in a team of 4 this year at CharityHack and it was the best Hack Day fun I had in a while. I wish more Hack Days would somehow promote team work, either by prizes per team member or any other way.

Funny hacks are fun, but beware with awarding them

There is a certain group of people – they know who they are – that are so creatively skilled that they can always come up with fun and entertaining hacks to show of at a Hack Day. These people add the casual fun to a Hack Day that sets it apart from most “professional events”.

I’m probably going to get a lot of slack for saying this though: I think something is wrong when you have 20 hacks where hackers spent all night without sleep working on solving certain technical, social, or economic issues and the person/group with the funny hack or flashy presentation runs of fwith the big award(s). This is demotivating and regularly unfair, and to be honest I think it stops people from investing their time to come to the next Hack Day.

Let me be clear: I don’t think all funny hacks don’t deserve to win, but there clearly have been some weird cases in the past. I also don’t want to blame the hackers, as they just did what they wanted, which is in their right. I do think we need to look at how judging is done though, which brings me to the next point.

We need a new way of judging

Let me summarise a Hack Day in numbers to highlight my point.

• Hackers sometimes spend weeks thinking of good ideas
• Hackers spend 24 hours or more working on their hack
• The judges make their decisions often within 30 minutes
• They base their judgements on presentations of 3 minutes or less
• And in some cases they never see the actual hack

You can see the time spent on fair judging is totally disproportionate. I know of a few cases where developers have managed to win prizes by presenting an idea that had never been built.

I was talking to some people about this and I think we all agreed that 3 minutes is not enough to explain or show some ideas. Obviously you want to keep the presentations short as we don’t want to sit through 5 hours of demos, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be a different solution. We came up with two possible solutions:

• A showcase in which teams can visit each other and see the hacks, while the judges make a round past each team. This would make it less boring than an hour of presentations, and allows for more people to specifically drop by on Sunday to see the hacks. Additionally this could be combined with an extra round of very short presentations in the end to show the hacks once more while the judges deliberate.
• 10 minute pitches with the judges in which each team gets to visit the judges separately and demo the “almost finished” product. The upside here is that the judges can better inspect if something real was build or not, the downside is that this will have to be spanned over 3 to 4 hours on Sunday, which causes other logistic issues.

Cheap prizes are better than shit prizes

This is a small thing I noticed recently, but I think it’s on most people’s mind. Getting something small and fun (or useful) is much more appreciated than winning a big amount that you can only spend in one of the sponsor’s own products. Similar getting simply mentioned to be the runner up for a certain nice award is more appreciated than winning a poster.

Here are some simple small things that I think we all like and isn’t pricey (feel free to suggest more):

• BoardGames – Cheap and fun
• iTunes gift cards – Worth some fun and easy to resell if someone does not use iTunes
• A nice certificate saying you ended up 2nd in the competition

Some people come to just hack

I understand that as an organiser you’re very pleased that you managed to get all those interesting speakers in the morning to educate us and spark our creativity, but some of us came to hack. Please provide a place for those of us to skip the talks and start work. 24 hours is short as it is, any extra few minutes we can get are much appreciated.