In my previous posts – Part 1 and Part 2 of how we started and built a hackathon from ground up, I began breaking down the DNA of Hackweekend. Here is the next post of the series.
Our next challenge proved to be interesting. Gathering amazing talent under one roof means that everyone is driven by their own agenda. Now while this is great from a creativity standpoint, having people work on their own agendas doesn’t always deliver simply because everyone is driven by different motivations and scope and move at a different pace on their own ideas. This was also one of the reasons why alot of the previous hackathons did not deliver in the first place. They were either, too wide or too niched.
The problem we had to solve was, how do we get all these developers to code on something we thought was cool and deserved some attention. The solution was not as simple as we thought. We needed a focus area that was not too broad but at the same time not too niche that people didn’t know or did not want to hack on it. We also needed something that was a current hot topic in the Technology world that everyone was eager to tackle.