Avoid These Five Pitfalls at Your Next Hackathon

Hackathons are a valuable tool for spurring innovative solutions to challenging problems, but they can fail badly. This can be particularly disheartening considering the substantial time, money, and other resources invested in preparation, organization, and execution. So, what causes them to go wrong?

In my research, I observed 48 distinct hackathons from five different perspectives: participant, mentor, organizer, observer, and adviser. The most significant overarching problem is that organizers don’t establish well-defined goals from the start. Among hackathons I studied, only a minority had well-defined objectives, capabilities, and methodologies for assessing the event’s success, along with a concrete execution plan.

The lessons that follow can help organizers of future hackathons steer clear of common mistakes.

1. Define a challenge that meets the needs of both organizers and participants. Incorrectly prepared, unclear, uninteresting, or impossible-to-solve challenges are among the most common reasons that hackathons fail. One HackYeah event included a challenge from an organization aiming to create a new, safer registration service for its product. The IT team prepared technical requirements and defined the challenge, but later the marketing department added more requirements, rendering the task unsolvable within the given hackathon time. The IT team discovered these amendments only at the beginning of the hackathon when the challenge details were released to the public. Of more than 2,000 participants and hundreds of teams, no one decided to take on this challenge, even though the prize was attractive, with a greater financial reward than in other challenges.

Challenges are the core around which everything else is later built, so they should be clearly defined before any other planning takes place. In the process, check that time constraints are realistic via a test run within the organization or by seeking advice from more experienced organizers.

2. Mentoring is poorly managed, inadequate, or absent. Participants usually need mentoring for issues that stall their progress with the challenge. In some hackathons, teams complained that mentors gave them bad advice that derailed the team’s progress and diverged from their initial good ideas. In another case, the organizing company decided that mentors would not be necessary for a few hours overnight. As a result, about a third of the people interested in the task decided to drop the challenge because they could not make progress during the night and decided that they would not be able to finish their project in the time allowed.

Manage the mentoring process closely to ensure that mentors have and follow good guidance on engaging with participants and that they are available as needed.

3. The hackathon has unclear or inadequate judging criteria. Participants should fully understand how their work will be evaluated at the start of the event. At many of the hackathons I studied, participants were upset and confused because of the uncertainty and lack of communication in this regard. These frustrations with an event can easily spill over into negative comments on social media about the experience, which affects the response to the outreach for future events and the organizer’s reputation.

Clear judging criteria communicated in the simplest possible manner are crucial for participants to embrace and understand the challenge.

4. There are too many tools in the toolbox. Many hackathons require participants to use too many disparate and unconnected tools. Those may include registration tools, various data access platforms, a separate submission repository, and diverse communication tools. Imagine a situation where, after 24 hours of exhausting work, you have to submit a project to a platform, add your ticket ID for verification (sent weeks before by the registration system provider), include a communication system tag (so that organizers can find a person if necessary), and add links from repositories such as GitHub or GitLab and video repositories from YouTube. People can make mistakes, often causing them to lose hackathons despite a potentially winning project. All the hackathons I observed suffered from this to some extent. Larger hackathons usually require more complex solutions and are therefore harder to manage when it comes to multi-tool disease.

Simplify, simplify, simplify, and consider the time-pressured user experience.

5. Participants’ health and well-being during the event are not considered. The average participant will spend more than 30 hours (24 hours of work and some time for arrival, judging, and award ceremony) with little or no sleep. Even when healthy options such as fruits and vegetables are available, many people fuel up on pizza and sugary snacks and consume copious amounts of coffee and energy drinks. Beer or other alcoholic beverages are often available, which can exacerbate problems further as participants push their limits both intellectually and physically. In extreme cases, this can trigger a medical emergency: In one hackathon, a person with a history of apnea consumed more than a dozen energy drinks within 16 hours and suffered convulsions and loss of oxygen that required emergency services.

Organizers should certainly issue a notice about participants’ responsibility for their own health. But for in-person or hybrid events, organizers should plan for quick medical care or have trained medical professionals on standby. They also should limit energy drinks and provide plenty of water and healthy foods. Some hackathons incorporate physical activities like yoga, stretching, or relaxation sessions. Increasingly, some include tasks, workshops, or seminars on maintaining health and well-being throughout the hackathon.

This list outlines a few of the problems I have observed at hackathons over the years. The key to addressing these challenges is to establish a comprehensive plan and hackathon strategy early on. Careful design, efficient management, establishment of clear objectives, and strategic planning can significantly contribute to mitigating these challenges for hosting a hackathon — and increase the likelihood that the event will yield the solutions and innovations the organizer is seeking.