I'm helping arrange some developers' events at work. They're meant for open source software developers, testers, documenters, and other contributors to get together, talk, and collaborate. We often call them hackathons. I'm directly planning, with a colleague, the October 14-16 hackathon in New Orleans. But I'm also advising volunteers and people at partner organizations who want to put on technical events -- for example, a British contributor is planning a hackathon in Brighton, 19-20 November. The Wikimedia Foundation itself can only put on a few events a year, but there's plenty of room and demand for smaller regional meetups, so I'm enthusiastically encouraging volunteers who want to throw a hacking party.

People keep acting as though I'll have useful advice for them in hackathon planning, so here goes! I do not want to reinvent the wheel here, so I'm liberally linking to others' existing guides and HOWTOs.

Goals

My colleague Siebrand Mazeland wrote some goals for an upcoming hackathon and I like them as an example. Note that this is for an event where we're expecting that most participants will be new to MediaWiki and to open source development in general:

• Inform participants about how the MediaWiki community works
• Inform participants of the major development languages and tools for MediaWiki
• Provide a brief, comprehensive, accessible overview of the exciting projects MediaWiki developers are working on -- convey that anyone with PHP knowledge, and who wants to build an excellent open source CV, can participate in the community
• Get current developers talking to prospective developers
• Get a few people (1-3) that were not MediaWiki developers beforehand to be MediaWiki developers within 2 months after the hackathon

First I'll talk about the social/content side of hackathons, and then some outreach/process stuff, and then the technical/logistics side.

People & Activities

Here's what I wrote while helping plan an upcoming hackathon, one of the first in its region:

Since I predict that at least half of the participants will be new to MediaWiki-related development, we'll want to seed the crowd with some more experienced developers (if possible, from the region). And we'll want to provide some direction and some pre-planned activities, especially for the first day (if we're assuming a two-day hackathon).

One of these activities should be the "how to start modding MediaWiki" lecture/workshop that we first led at Wikimania. A colleague and I will be cleaning up those notes in September to create a curriculum that a local developer could use to teach.

Other preplanned activities would include just enough structure to help inform and guide the energy of new, uncertain participants. For example, organizers should ask several local developers, ahead of time, to prepare sets of tasks that small groups could work on, such as "fix these ten bugs in Kiwix" or "add language support for (this language) to (tool)." It would be best if these developers could also give extremely short talks about their areas of interest (3-5 minutes each, no slides necessary). In the afternoon of the first day, and at the beginning of the second day, there would be a twenty-minute period of these "lightning talks" and then participants could decide what group to join.

I am generally in favor of allowing some room for spontaneity, by asking participants on the first day what they're interested in working on, encouraging them to give ad hoc lightning talks during the short talks sessions, and by encouraging participants to lead sprints on topics of their interest. Technologists feel more inspired and creative if there's lots of support (people who are willing to teach and mentor) but also freedom to discover and concentrate on new interests.

It's tempting for organizers to say "let's concentrate on this! and this! and this!" at a hackathon. But you can't concentrate on localisation, and mobile, and accessibility, and HTTPS, and mass uploaders, and usability, and the article feedback tool, and and and. :-) If you really want some topic focus at the hackathon, choose maybe 2 concentrations a day, and target your outreach and publicity, saying that you especially welcome participation in those areas.

Some Things You'll Need for a successful developer outreach event:

• a public wiki page stating the date, time, and venue, and specifying that everyone is welcome. Also tell people what to bring (laptop and power cord), ask them for topic ideas, and ask them to put their names down -- no obligation. A sample.
• outreach/publicity drive, starting at least six weeks in advance, to relevant communities. Ideally you'd get the word out to technical interest groups, local user groups, consultants and other businesses in the industry, individuals whom you want to attend, professors and colleges and universities and technical schools and trainers, email lists, and (if relevant to your audience) newspapers.
• some experienced developers. I don't know the exact ratio, but perhaps a fifth of your participants should be people who have had some experience in developing Wikimedia/MediaWiki stuff, loosely defined. You need some seeds.
• documentation tools & some people who will take notes with them (more below).
• lightweight tracking. At some point, somehow, at the event, get every participant's name and email address. That way you can follow up and continue encouraging them after the event.

Technical stuff & logistics

I find that the Stumptown Syndicate's Event Planning Handbook section on logistics ably summarizes the logistical side of what's needed at a technical event.

Basically, once you have a venue, the next priority is provision for robust wireless (and, if possible, wired) internet, and provision for heavy electrical power usage.

You'll want to have some kind of documentation of your hackathon, to make it easier for people to collaborate (face-to-face and remotely), and to have a record for future reference. As we decided for the Berlin WMDE hackathon this year (thanks to Daniel Kinzler for distilling this hierarchy):

1. textual documentation: essential
2. live textual documentation (IRC, Etherpad): important
3. photo documentation: important
4. audio recording: important
5. video recording: would be good
6. audio streaming: would be good
7. video streaming: nice to have

It's great to have two dedicated notetakers/facilitators typing into Etherpad for collborative notetaking, finding and answering questions on IRC and blogging, and walking around talking to people and asking them what they're working on and helping them collaborate more effectively.

And below I'll reproduce a note that Jon Davis, formerly of Wikimedia internal IT, wrote about audio recording and streaming (when planning for the Berlin WMDE developers' days):

The biggest problem is getting reasonably quality audio to a computer. The single biggest complaint I've had... was that it was hard to hear people. [You'll] need some reasonably quality microphones to capture with. If it is presentations, I recommend some sort of shotgun style mic. If it is a group talk, something omnidirectional. The trouble is twofold.

#1 - I couldn't find any USB compatible shotgun mics off hand. You can, in effect make one with the right parts [1], [2], but it's definitely not cheap.

#2 - The USB omni-directional that I found [3] isn't cheap, and I've no idea what the quality is.

So [you'd] need at least one mic setup (and probably computer) per area [you] are trying to record. It's not... "great", but it sure beats running a ton of cable, doing mixing and all sorts of much more pro level work. I have no idea what the budget is for that sort of thing, so it might not be a big deal...

There is probably far better advice out there regarding recording/streaming video and audio. I welcome links and experiences.

You'll also want to consider bathrooms, garbage needs, whiteboards and markers, and maybe childcare, and so on -- the sorts of things conference organizers need to consider, in general. A few guides with tips on what to consider:

• http://www.quirksmode.org/coh/
• http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editathon
• http://communitymgt.wikia.com/wiki/Unconference

And of course there is a lot of "how to run a conference" reference material available for your perusal, including ConRunner, which focuses on science fiction convention organizers but which has more generally applicable advice. And hey, they're running MediaWiki!

Questions, links, comments welcome in the comments.