Published on July 27, 2015.
For hackathons, differentiation isn’t the goal.
I spent last weekend at Hackcon, the hackathon organizers conference. On Sunday, I was tasked with taking notes for a workshop entitled “Being Different,” which spun out from Jeff Hilnbrand’s talk on the same subject. Instead of publishing my messy notes, I’m publishing a summary of our discussion, and some points I didn’t get to make day of.
"We're just changing the metadata of our hackathons: title, location" @jhilmd of @bitcmp #hackcon
— Dan Schlosser (@danrschlosser) July 19, 2015
A quote from Jeff Hilnbrand’s talk
The general zeitgeist going into the “Being Different” Hackcon workshop was that hackathons are all pretty similar: 24–48 hours, sponsors, prizes, apps, food, caffeine, and probably a midnight surprise. Each event might have it’s own little spin, but for the most part we were all working off the same model. This model, while tried and true, has several problems in it, which prompted our group to think about how to change it. The core of our discussion centered around two questions.
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