Please feel free to branch and suggest pull edits so we can continue to improve the communities event checklists.
The "Community Champion" is the person responsible for helping oragnise the long term health of an 'Open Cross-Cloud Application Developer community'. This person must be passionate for the local volonteer community and willing to spend many a late night planning the next amazing event for one and all. Their thirst for knowledge must be insatiable, and yet their willingness for someone else to go before them -helping all- shall be naturally paramount.
Your objectives as the "Community Champion" (if you so choose to accept them...[1]):
- get to know the core community of hackers: who they are and what tech they passionatley use.
- search and befriend the best of the best hackers, recruiting them to volonteer their time to build a new cloud application community
- talk to one and all to find out what kinds of hacking events they want to attend next, and who can volonteer to help at future events.
NB by "hackers" we mean anyone who playfully makes life work for them in as fast and fun a way as possible (not necessarily a coder, devopps, sysadmin, appdev, marketeer, et al).
The below checklists are intended to provide the minimum viable set of tasks which will need to be completed by the Community Champion for the hackathon. Naturally, you will add on additional tasks yourself and we would highly encourage you to create your own checklists and share them back with the community[1].
Are you ready to contribute to an amazing new tech community? Ok then, let's get going!
Things to get done prior to the hackathon beginning:
- Help organise pre-hackathon training with the 'training sensei' assuring communities far and wide are aware of this newly emerging cloud application developer community.
- Help promote the event with the 'marketting guru' by assuring the logos and signage represent the core values and cultures of the local community.
- Help the 'registration monarch' with team and individual registrations so everyone finds a hacker friendly group.
- Support the 'lead event hacker' to put on weekly/fortnightly planning meetings with all the key community organisers.
- Be on the lookout for any potential collaboration opportunities with other community leaders.
- In the week leading up to the main event, be supporting and positive to everyone. Reassure everyone the event is going to be amazing (bcuz bringing brilliant people together always is).
Tasks to achieve during the event:
- Wander between team to team, observing and offering to help wherever possible.
- TAKE PICTURES! ...and social medias with permission :)
- Liaise with the judges chair to help notify status of team progress.
- Remind teams of the timeboxing required to get things done, offer to find them help.
- Have lots of conversations during meals times and ask people how they are feeling, what the event has been like for them. Be a living survey to help feedback information for the next event.
- Make sure all the team register and present something to the judges.
- Take notes on which teams are the best and get their contact details so you can contact them after the event.
Taks to achieve after the event:
- This is your time to shine, this is your opportunity to kickstart a new community into existence! Be excited and have save your engergy during the hackathon so you can help carry everyone through after the event.
- Write blog posts talking about how you saw people connecting together, name people who were amazing (not just the winners, but the people who enjoyed the event and hacking together as a community). Pictures or animated GIFs for extra points.
- Agree where the community is going to carry on with the online conversation: mailing lists, slacks, groups, etc.
- Buy coffees for some of the people you met and ask them to help you carry on building the community.
- Announce the next follow-up event, be that social, training or celebratory.
- Example from Taipei
- Example from Guadalajara
- Interesting resource worth reading.
- Some precedents of how other open communities do this.
- A helpful person worth contacting and having a chat.
- 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'.
Footnotes: [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/