I received an email from another company looking to set up a hack-a-thon. I thought I would post my response as their questions revolve around "Who is the event for?"
Question #1: Did you judge after the fact or on the spot?
It is great to have a system set up in place to be able to award a "winner" at the end of the ceremony. It reinforces the concept this is a time-boxed event and provides closure to the emotional investment everyone has placed on the past 24 hour effort.
With that said, Digital Reasoning allowed voting afterward and throughout the weekend. It has become apparent that most of the voting occurred within the first 60 minutes. The balance of the time since then has taken away from an otherwise climatic announcement.
I would suggest having ballots already sent out for people to vote from once the presentation starts. 15-30 minutes after the last presentation is when results could be posted.
Question #2: Did you let teams self judge or have independent judging?
I think this question calls upon the spirit of the event. Who is the event for? (no wrong answer from my vantage point, however a software developer may disagree.)
Digital Reasoning tried to gravitate toward the philosophy "for the developers, by the developers". This was the developers event to work on something relating to the company, however management was not going to place boundaries on it. This was our foundation for nurturing innovation. In essence the company asked "let's see what you got..." (management was pleasantly surprised.) Suffice to say, the developers were able to vote on the projects at the end. Management was also able to cast votes, however we did not set it up as a "judges panel" for critique and comments.
Comment #1:
Laying out the problems the day of the event. Although our event was structured slightly different with regard to letting developers come up with the ideas, I would still recommend a way to role out the problems prior to the event. Personally I have seen it done both ways. In my experience the "heads up" approach allow natural leaders to self organize and maximize the time set aside for the event. Because developers tend to struggle with defining a specific value proposition, it is good to allow them some time to talk it through and get their arms around the 24 hour goal.
As Scrum Master and Project Manager for DR, I enjoyed the process immensely. The devil was in the details on how we executed the event. There were definitely some lessons learned for us, but overall things went smoothly. I tried my best to stay out of the planning process as this was a "for developers by developers" event, however next time I may provide some gentle nudging.
:-)
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