As part of the Filecoin Orbit Community Program, we founded the Web3 Library, a digital space for people to collaboratively learn and build.

Hackathons are an exciting way to learn, build and collaborate. We feel that we can improve the current structure to be more inclusive, accessible, and effective.

On our way to the meta-hack (a hackathon about hackathons) in October, we’re hosting monthly workshops to brainstorm ideas, gain perspectives, and perhaps most importantly, identify essential questions. Here’s a short retrospective of our first workshop, our first attempt at reshaping hackathons!

Setting the Stage - Charley Chen of FilSwan & the Discordian of Protocol Labs

Hackers - technical or not - are an essential part of building the future of web3. From a hackathon organizer's perspective, it is crucial to communicate clearly about the products/values/future paths/rules to the hackers so that a hackathon might be successful. But what makes a hackathon successful? What can we measure? What should we avoid? Well, it depends! In general, we’d like the hackers to have fun, explore and experiment, network and collaborate. As organizers, we want to support them throughout and even after the hackathon with grants to continue building on their ideas. Here’re some practical tips from our Guest of Honor:

• Avoid giving prizes to a team that cheated
• Provide office hours and mentor sessions
• Make sure you have enough resources available to hackers
• If teams ask for more time / about prize money, encourage them to apply for grants!

Workshop #1 - What might a meta-hackathon look like?

A big motivation behind hosting these workshops is inviting people to imagine the structure and scope of a meta-hackathon - a hackathon focusing on improving hackathons. A hackathon could mean many things. For us, it’s a competition wherein groups and individuals strive to solve problems using technological means during a set time frame. Or more broadly, a group of people coming together to realize an idea. To have a successful meta-hackathon, we first need to recognize what are some current problems/challenges in hackathons:

• Governance structure
  • regular check-ins, office hours for the mentors
• Proper feedback to hackathonners
• Inclusion / creating a welcoming space
• Communication
• How to build better teams
  • Including new people outside of a core friend group
  • Trusting individuals outside of friend group
  • Many developers do not want to outreach
  • Teammates dropping out of projects mid-hackathon
• Getting non-coders involved in hackathons

With these (so many more-to-come) challenges, we’ll be figuring out how to translate these problems to bounties/tracks for the meta-hackathon, hopefully with some of your help - the next workshop is in late August!

Workshop #2 - Study Groups in Hackathons

As one of the initiatives at Web3 Library, we’ve been doing a weekly study group session of ProtoSchool. This helps to keep us accountable and to better able to understand the content from multiple perspectives. The group has 9 people, we meet on GatherTown (at least we used to, now we’re on discord!) and discuss a lesson from ProtoSchool. Our structure is pretty flexible, it usually starts with one volunteer summarizing the lesson for everyone (but they’re not responsible to know everything). Anyone who has questions feels safe and encouraged to ask the group, then we all try to explain and figure things out. Having a structure is great, but continuously getting feedback to improve that structure customized to the group is key to making a study group last.

In the context of a hackathon, how might we integrate the idea of study groups to help people learn better?

• BEFORE a hackathon → provide people with basic knowledge coming into the hackathon and enable people to know each other before teaming up
• DURING a hackathon →  create stronger bonds as a team and make sure everyone is on the same page
• AFTER a hackathon → share the knowledge they learned from the hackathon and ways to improve

Finally, these study groups don’t have to all center around technical materials, it could also be about how to brainstorm ideas, collaborate across time zones, etc.

Workshop #3 - Teach Anything

Teach Anything is usually an 80-minute event, broken into four 20-minute sessions. For each session, a person will teach something of their choosing to the audience. The topic can be Themed (such as “Anything that I learned in this Hackathon”) or Anything (literally anything, such as “Why I love DnD '' or “How to do design thinking”). Ideally, the organizers of a hackathon will facilitate scheduling and maintain a sign-up sheet. Applying Teach Anything to hackathons can be an ice-breaking, knowledge sharing, team-building, and community engagement tool. It’s also a great way to verify you learned something effectively and can improve presentations for the final projects.

Reflections

Overall, we think the workshops went well but there’s definitely room for improvement. We love how everyone contributed to the conversations and that we're making steady progress towards the meta-hackathon in October. However, we can still do a better job at communicating with the attendees before the workshop such that we all have a shared context to build upon, whether that be sharing an article written by us or having a quick call to clear up any confusion. In terms of time commitment, instead of advertising the workshop as 2-hour, we’ll break it into two 1-hour sessions and invite people to join either or both.

Learning from our first session, we decide to write a concise invitation letter to all Guest of Honor, where we ask to schedule a 15-minute preparatory call to

• Let them know what we are doing,
• Ask them how they would like to participate
  • such as taking one of the two 5-minute spotlights to share something, taking notes, providing a problem statement for the breakouts, or just being present for questions and participating

Onward!

Our next workshop will be on August 25, 10:00am – 12:00pm CT and here’s a brief agenda:

Join Us!

We invite you to visit our Discord to take part in our community and leave comments on our Workshop intro page on Notion!