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by saul_goodman
4121 days ago
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A hackathon at a school is going to exist to further the adjenda of the school which is fine, but not anything related to "hacker ethos". A hackathon at an actual hackerspace however will be much closer to what you are after. Some other folks brought up Startup Weekends. We have them in my town and I've never seen them get anything off the ground. Some of the organizers tried to cozy up to our hackerspace which is fine, but we really had nothing in common. The reality is that Startup Weekends are stupid. It's a nice idea to get a bunch of technical people and investors together to build something, but you don't start a business worth pursuing by committee. You have a small number of folks very focused on what they want and that builds momentum until it can draw others in. By the time outsiders are being attracted there's usually a solid idea there that people are contributing towards. A committee is going to water an idea down until it's a shallow frank-n-beans version of the original idea. The other possibility is that they end up making a new "Uber for X" which never goes anywhere. But someone with their wits about them can use this to networking opportunity with local tallent. Just don't participate in the main project if you can avoid it. |
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A ton of it is muddled in politics and branding. I have yet to see many "big, scalable" companies come out of the ones that have been hosted.
Getting developers is tough, and being the only developer on the organizing team selling the event to other developers when they had free, more legit hackathons made it an insane choice.
I will say that events that Code for America have hosted have been nice. They seem as far as I can tell trying to change something a little more real than the "Uber for X".