##The 'lead hacker' is reponsible for the overall success of the event. You should be a well organised person, able to kindly delegate tasks and humbly ask for help. You will have run events before with an understanding for basic community principles: especially inclusion, kindness and 'a steady hand' when things get stressful.
Your objectives as the "Lead Hacker" (if you so choose to accept them...[1]):
- Assemble a team of event organisers who are passionate for building up your local community.
- Organise weekly/fortnightly meetings to bring the event organising team together to communicate.
- Answer questions daily, being on-call wherever you are needed. Promote, promote, promote.
- Be the cheerleader, help people, do everything you can to make the event a positively-organised experience for everyone.
The below checklists are intended to provide the minimum viable set of tasks which will need to be completed for the hackathon. Naturally, you will add on additional tasks to make your event even better and we would highly encourage you to create your own checklists and share them back with the community[1].
- Contact the OpenStack "Application Hackathon Working Group" to find an Ambassador who can support you throughout the event. A liaison from the OpenStack Foundation will be assigned to support you.
- Recruit the x10 event organisers who will help you achieve a successful hackathon event, show them this repository with a list of checklists for the roles they will need to undertake as part of the event organising team.
- Lock down a venue, i.e. lock down the date and tell a new person every day about the Hackathon. Hint: use any contacts you have at Universities as the Uni will often sponsor the event by donating the space.
- Come up with the main theme (aka "tag line') of your event, how can you get all the "idea people" to come to this event and participate. Your event logo will represent this tag line. Your logo will be used on everything. Hint: what is happening at the time of your planned event, any news headlines likely - be timely!
- Organise a simple one page website with basic instructions on how to get involved. Ask your friendly OpenStack liaision to help provide examples of past events. Don't forget: pictures, video and more pictures.
- Run regular weekly/fortnightly conference calls to make sure your organising team is on track - have fun, encourage smiles as this event is about having fun with ideas!
- Your hackathon begins with the informal training events which happen once month building up to the event, make sure the cloud and trainers are ready. <-- this is where teams will form.
Tasks to achieve during the event:
- Get your team of community volonteer excited, host a pre-party if you have room in the budget.
- Provide a timeline for setup along with times for orientations/briefings.
- Greet and chat with as many participants as possible, get their feedback and take a note of it for future events.
- Help people cope with the stress of an event, no event goes to plan perfectly so help people cope with change (including yourself ;-)
- Make sure the community knows when the next event is going to happen.
- Thank yous to your amazing event organisers, mentors, sponsors and participants <-- cannot beging to express how important this is!
Taks to achieve after the event:
- Liaise with the winning teams to make sure they get their prizes and are engaged.
- Get all your event volonteers to provide feedback and reflections of what went well (you should keep) and what you might want to change (deltas).
- Write a blog post or the like to the whole community providing highlights and reflections, along with a vision for the future of the community.
- (Frequently Asked Questions guide from Guadalajara Hackathon](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KO3LdLmw3LePttW4mY0EhMKVoq1IhyF64f7DwVNkkpo/pub)
- Interesting resource worth reading.
- Some precedents of how other open communities do this.
- A helpful person worth contacting and having a chat.
- Example from Taipei
- Example from Guadalajara
- Why use checklists? Humans are not great at remembering stuff, this is how mistakes happen, people forget things when they are in stressful situations (like events), checklists are great for focusing the mind and result in significant productivity gains. Read more about this in a book caled, 'The Checklist Manifesto'.
[1]= these checklists are intentionally created in github so you can take advantage of the GitHub versioning model which allows you to suggest edits and submit them back to the community for reuse. For instructions on how to branch and submit a pull request please see: https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/