In our day and age, with the current pandemic ongoing, alternative ways of organizing events are a necessity instead of cancelling and stalling everything. Thus they are a variety of options and ways to set-up and organize a Hackathon in the days of the pandemic. Online Hackathons seem to be the new trend with currently multiple active ones ongoing.
The research community worldwide has been immensely taking action during this unprecedented time period, carrying out remote activities about COVID-19. Online Hackathons which are related with the corona-virus pandemic consist an international challenge about technology, creativity and innovation that aim to find easily expandable and competitive solutions that will help address the crisis caused by the spread of COVID-19.
This article aims to present the first actions to face, the organization of the event.
1st steps and General Structure
The general structure should consider:
- Proposing issues, problems and challenges that need a solution in society, health, entrepreneurship and economy (public submission of proposals - deliberation).
- Developing innovative methodologies and applications that address these problems (participants - contestants).
- Supporting this effort (mentors, sponsors, supporters, public organizations, companies, collective entities).
Groups are created with remote collaboration tools. Usually groups are formed with topics to work on. For instance, there should be groups for FAIR data, workflows and pipelines, variation graphs, machine learning, text mining and visualizations. It depends on the Hackathon’s thematic scale; the group formation may be interdisciplinary. Other than possible communication problems that may occur online, their role within an online Hackathon doesn’t change dramatically.
Mentors are experts in the given theme/themes. Each mentor may have a different field of expertise but all are not one-dimensional and have general knowledge about the event’s problem/problems. A huge part of its success depends on the mentors. They apply for a mentoring spot before the event starts and have to be available whenever possible to help out a team. They do not give solutions and answers but encourage innovative ideas. During this online Hackathon, mentors are available twice a week (Thursday and Friday noon-afternoon) for one month. One could say their role now is a harder to carry out and perform as it is not as easy to help people from distance as it is face to face.
Mentors and Organizers
The mentors are key person for the best development of the Hackathon. Their roles include:
- Help teams brainstorm.
- Give advice on a topic of their expertise.
- Keep an eye on the time, the schedule is usually quite intense.
- Help divide roles inside the team, often groups have leadership and dividing workload difficulties.
- Encourage the team and its ideas/solution.
- Help pick out who will do the presentation/pitch.
- Communicate constantly with the organizers.
- State their availability.
- Use the given online tools.
Organizers set-up and organize the whole event but also inform both mentors and groups about different deadlines, meetings and training courses. They also help the mentors sort out their dates and inform the groups when each mentor is available. All of these actions are handled with different excel files (info about mentors, groups etc.), slack, doodles and e-mails.