How to Organize a Hackathon?

Question

I'm organizing a Hackathon for a part of my company next week and would love some advice.We are about 20 people with a mix of mostly engineers, but also designers and product managers. It's going to be for 4 days, Monday to Thursday.The main purpose is to foster team spirit and allow people to work on something that we believe will make our users happy. And it is not driven from top leadership, commercial interests or investors.I'm thinking starting Monday with ideation: First brainstorming, pitching ideas and then voting. Lastly we try to organize ourselves into groups that are able to take on ~4 ideas. We end on Thursday with presenting what we built.Does anyone have experience with organizing something similar and can give general advice on dos and donts or similar? I understand this could have been planned a lot earlier etc but it is what it is.

seism · Accepted Answer

Kudos on the idea, and for reaching out here! I build open source tools for hackathons, something I posted about here a few days ago. Your question is a great one, because small private events are not really addressed well by the typical guidance for large (100+) event organizers. Let me (with a little help from my fine-tuned assistant) give it a try:
Do: communicate the objectives and rules clearly (e.g. Gantt chart the timeline), encourage a diverse mix (friends and family, also to boost the audience), provide necessary resources for ideation (from high quality moderation kits to healthy snacks and water), allocate time for brainstorming, pitching, voting, and development stages, and ensure there are mentors available (at least people with some prior hackathon experience) to guide the teams. Think about some creative team-building activities.
Don't: overload participants with too many rules, micromanage the teams, celebrate individual achievements over ensuring all participants get something out of it, or make the hackathon too competitive.
In summary: focus on learning, collaboration, and having fun while documenting the process and outcomes for future reference. Especially for that last point, feel free to test Dribdat in our sandbox, or ping me if you want something more robust & private.
Good luck with your event!