DRAFT: Hackathon Support Team

Authors: @wolovim
Previous ideation: Idea: D_D Hackathon Funnel

Summary

A Hackathon Support Team can help members succeed at hackathons by helping them form teams, get moving quickly with starter kits, present well with slide deck templates, and other forms of support.

Motivation

Helping members succeed in hackathons should be part of the core of the D_D experience: itā€™s a social/networking event, you learn new skills, build resume-worthy open source projects (i.e., public goods), and interact with hiring organizations.

The social element of hackathons is a crucial component to the motivation here. Weā€™re a social DAO lacking in social opportunities. Building stuff with new or old friends can be a memorable and meaningful social experience.

Mission, values and goals alignment

As a refresher:

D_D Mission:

  • Developer DAO exists to accelerate the education and impact of a new wave of web3 builders.

D_D Goals:

  • Onboard, Educate & Support Web3 Developers
  • Foster & Build Web3 Tools & Public Goods

Hackathons offer the perfect vehicle for D_Dā€™s mission and goals: building small, stretch-goal projects with a team can be a massively impactful way to learn new skills quickly. Generally speaking, the output of hackathons are open source (public good) codebases.

The material output of the Hackathon Support team will itself be a public good: resources for getting started quickly, presenting well, and so on.

Brand usage

  • A D_D org github repo will contain a list of resources and tips.
  • If template slide decks or other assets are provided, they may include D_D logos/branding.
  • If teams we support want to give D_D a shout-out in some form, thatā€™s up to them.

Scope of work

To start, this will be a very lean operation. Iā€™m hoping to prove the concept and get more people excited over time. Would love to find myself in a position to need to ask for budget expansion after a month or two.

MVP:

  • Open up a github repo and start to collect project starter kits, hackathon tips, and other resources that help people be successful.
  • Offer bounties to designers for template slide decks and other assets that may be useful for presenting hackathon projects.
  • Maintain a hackathon schedule.
  • For each hackathon, open up social spaces (e.g., Discord threads/channels) for preparing for or forming teams. (Potential to demo Eden Protocol for this purpose, too.)

Financial implications

MVP:

  • Initiative lead (3 hours/wk): ongoing maintenance of resources repo, hackathon calendar, Discord spaces. Creation and execution of bounties.
  • Bounty pool (??? $CODE): creation of design assets, relevant written/audio/video guides, one-off help.

Team

MVP:

@wolovim: Initiative Lead

Success Metrics & KPIs

MVP ideas:

  • confirm X teams with at least one D_D member have joined hackathons per month or per prioritized event
  • X% of teams make it all the way to presenting their projects to judges

Next Steps

The MVP features listed in Scope of Work. Possible expansion into the Discord server to have its own category focused on this initiative. Today there exists one forum channel recently created: #join-hackathons. Seems worthwhile to include at least one more read only channel with some context and links to the resources outlined in this proposal (e.g., repo, calendar).

Post-MVP ideas:

  • get connected with relevant mentors in the DAO at time of need (see: mentorship program)
  • build and maintain our own hackathon starter kits within the DAO
  • skills training (possibly via D_D Academy) leading up to hackathons
  • presentation training or dry run feedback opportunities prior to project submission
  • maintain a project idea board or otherwise help generate project ideas
  • send qualified hackers to IRL events via a travel budget
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A Developer DAO member reached out to me via Telegram last week Thursday (24th November), regarding the future aspirations for hackathons.

I laid out what weā€™ve previously discussed around offering a starter kit etc, and provided a high-level overview of how Iā€™ve been thinking about ā€˜eventsā€™ (using an umbrella term). Ref:

Link

anyway from what Iā€™ve found, it appears that the most requested thing at this juncture and arguably the most impactful first step, is to produce a list of all upcoming hackathons. separated by:

ā€¢ online

ā€¢ IRL (per-region)

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He only went and did it :clap: :clap: :clap:

Great initiative @wolovim, loving the simple first approach. How can we help move this along?

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I support this! Is there an existing hackathon schedule maintain by another group we could use, such as Hackathons | Gitcoin?

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could/should fundraising operators play a role in this? @wolovim

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thanks @luan for the context. agree the virtual vs. IRL listing in an important designation; my assumption would be a focus on virtual events initially, but IRL introduces some interesting possibilities. tangentially, i read your events team thoughts in the thread and like where thatā€™s headed, re: visible events calendar and highlighting what weā€™re having a presence at. my early thinking is that we may need to prioritize a small number of hackathons within this support team if we want to reach some critical mass of dao member participants for each.

Good q. In my limited time between now and end of the year, I can definitely take some first steps here. I guess up for debate is when to elevate this proposal for formal budget consideration. Remaining details in this proposal are the success metrics and size of bounty pool - both of which I welcome comment on.

I would be surprised if there werenā€™t some good aggregated data sources out there. Happy to borrow from or promote lists created by others, but if we were to keep our own copy, we could include some additional metadata relevant to us, e.g., specific perks for dao members, highlight partner orgs or priority events, etc. A good starting point is definitely to collect those disparate data sources/calendars.

i hope so! i invite you and @Wikist to brainstorm and let me know of any ideas that get you excited. as food for thought, one thing that iā€™d love to see happen eventually is a travel budget for sending qualified* hackers to IRL events. re: qualified*, undetermined what would qualify someone for this today, but iā€™m adding this idea to the list of Post-MVP ideas.

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Totally agree with you on that :pray:t5:

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:+1: I like it! That would make a lot of sense.

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@wolovim , @john-mac.eth and I were just on a call hosted by @tippi fifestarr#4225 - to be found in Discord. The show was ā€œTopic: Teach Anything (Hackathons!)ā€.

The first guest spoke explicitly about approach to and his experience in mentoring a few teams during any given hackathon, and what the makeup of different teams can look like.

The next guest complemented that beautifully by outlining what teams can do to organise themselves before, during and after a hackathon to achieve more success with what they are building e.g. the roles they can assign each other, good use of media at different stages to garner interest. And those same guidelines prove to give more longevity of (working) relationships for the team members.

Tippi has just got started on the Mentorship Programme. He has got a lot of energy for hackathons. I mean, heā€™s organising hackathons about hackathons. He has his head screwed. Definitely give him a shout!

Oh yeah, and just reading that suggestion on prepping folks by way of the Academy - goosebumps!! Mentorship programme, Workshops, Perks, Agency, donā€™t stopā€¦itā€™s all coming together!!! Woo hoo!!!

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thanks for the connection - just the type of folks i want to hear from! will reach out and tap their galaxybrains. iā€™ll look to give these conversations a proper home in the discord too.

excited to see more corners of the dao connect too :slight_smile:

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Iā€™ve organized, run, attended, sponsored and won many hackathons. I would love to contribute to this. Please let me know if thereā€™s any needed help.

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gmšŸŒ±folks. I just got back from EthIndia. I have mentored and judged in one of the hackerhouse over there called TPG EthIndia Hackerhouse. I helped with ideation, frontend, solidity and some other techs. (This is a women led org who arranged this hackerhouse for everyone, and this hackerhouse also invited folks who were attending EthIndia and folks who were not hacking in EthIndia but wants to build.)

I want to add my thoughts regarding ā€œHackathon Support Teamā€ :

  • rather than putting together a resources, I would suggest having team members/mentors to help the folks from the ideation part. Because beginners/first timers set the bar too high and become frustrated in the middle and dont finish it.
  • setting a pool of hackathon mentors who are willing to help these folks for online and offline hackathons.
  • making sure that the mentors are available during the hackathon time to help out.

I would love to help out also with mentoring and teaching for this also. :sparkles:

cc: @wolovim

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great observation! i havenā€™t thought much about the idea generation phase yet beyond possibly keeping a list of suggestions. interested to explore this more.

really hoping to see this come to fruition and grow with time. reached out to the mentorship team already to introduce the idea, but i definitely welcome support in growing this pool of mentors and structuring their experience for helping hackathon participants.

:heart:

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Love it, letā€™s explore more on this. As someone experienced it through participants first hand, I can share some more inputs.

I would also suggest looking beyond just mentorship team domain on this. even though a good set of mentors are on mentorship team domain but still there are a lot of folks in the DAO outside of this teamā€™s domain who are not associated with mentorship program but still helping folks in irl hackathons and online ones.

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one idea here is asking partners what theyā€™d like to see built, many of them maintain lists of both domains and specifics things theyā€™re interested in seeing.

may also be worth speaking with partners and seeing if their devs/devrels might want to help some folks if theyā€™re building on their tools :eyes: - could be easy win and good value for partners/hackers.

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How can I support this initiative?

Here is a link to the recent Teach Anything (Hackathons) that I hosted.

Would be happy to facilitate another one for D_D next month (first timeā€™s free!), and offer a sponsorship / collaboration opportunity to test your HST concept in a safe place, the upcoming Hackathon Hackathon (metaHackathon(0)). We are planning to rename this for obvious reasons.

Below is an early draft of our poster, we could totally put a thing like ā€œSupported by: D_D Hackathon Support Team!ā€ and the logo etc.

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gm. an update: with my limited bandwidth, iā€™ve decided to prioritize Academy and not proceed with this proposal in Season 2.

that said, iā€™d still love too see D_D invest in this area and think thereā€™s tons of value to discover for members in this domain.

if anyone wants to incorporate ideas from this proposal into something else, please go for it or reach out on discord if you want chat about it. :handshake:

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