Hello Hackers! Welcome to the "Hacks for Hackathons" blog series.🙏
In this blog series, we will cover the best practices from hackathons. This is the first part that is about how to host successful online hackathons or migrating your offline hackathons to online during a crisis.

A hackathon is defined by Major League Hacking as an ‘invention marathon.’ The industry today considers Hackathons to be a major technical sport or a developer gig for building the next big app or solution. Over the years many global brands like Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon, Twilio, Google have been committed to supporting the next generation of software developers for many years through hackathons. India is one of the largest developer economies and host to the maximum hackathons worldwide. On average monthly over 25+ Hackathons happen on some of the famous Indian hackathon platforms like Skillenza, Hackerearth, TechGig and more.
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The novel coronavirus, nCOV-19/COVID-19 🦠 spread across the planet is declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Big developer economies like the USA, China and India are a victim of this. Considering all the guidance from the international and national health authorities about social distancing, every organization is taking its step to ship developer experiences remotely/online. Being a part of DevRel – I spend a fair amount of time either organizing/mentoring/judging hackathons. And right now, I hear every hackathon organizer freaking out because of all that yearlong planning 📅💰.

So, what is to run hackathons online without any Hackathon Management Portal?

You can definitely pick any e2e Hackathon Management platforms like mentioned above but guess what those come with a bunch of features and commercials too.💲

As an organizer, you can still greet first-time hackers with your customized bitmoji (on email) instead of shaking hands at the online check-in. Okay, there’s a lot of logistics we need to consider when we do offline hackathons like 🍕, Swags, Hacker Interactions, Mentorship Panels, Judging – but in case of online hackathons, the process is a little different and simple too. So what is it like to run a hackathon with a zero budget? 🤔

ℹ️Website

• Create a simple website using the HTML5 Boilerplate – it’s fast, robust and adaptable to web apps or sites.
• Hosting your website
  • Use GitHub Pages to host it for FREE(hackathon_name.github.io/repository)
    • The step-wise process to setup GitHub Pages
  • and link to your custom domain (if you have)

📝Registrations

• Use Forms linking it to your hackathon website
• Found this interesting MyMLH API that helps you share and manage the registration data in one click

📚Developer Content & Resources

While running Online Hackathons I recommend creating a resource repository on GitHub for developers to access.
Example: Azure Hackbook.

Sign up on Microsoft Azure ☁️ to claim a Free Trial or Azure For Students Offer for your next hackathon.💯

💻Hackathon Management(using GitHub)

• Set up a GitHub account from your Organization
• Create a repository with your Hackathon Name – add description and URL
• Create a README.md – to add the basic information
• Create a rules.md – to add the basic rules for your online hackathon
• Create a submissions template – for your hackathon teams to submit their projects using create a NEW ISSUE
• All project submissions appear as ISSUES on GitHub

💡 Pro-tip: Ask your attendees to add LABELS for various Themes/Tracks of the Hackathon.

• Assign Mentors using @ tag to help into the specific projects as per the track/theme. 👨‍💻👩‍💻
• Once all the checklist on the each of Project/ISSUE is resolved – close the ISSUES. Check out this project submission page on GitHub ✔️

If you are a Hackathon Organizer – FORK 🍴 this sample Hackathon repository to set up your own Hackathon Portal and EDIT using simple markdown😉

📢Communications

Communications are a big part of hackathons, say it the invitation emails to winner announcement or even the Mentor discussions. It's always a great idea to pick an IM platform to help hackers make those conversations.

• Mailers – Use MailChimp
• Announcements/ Instant Messaging
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Slack
• Social - Twitter & Instagram

🌟 There is a lot more you can do to engage with your developers online. From streaming multi-player games to a slideshow karaoke. Learn more about some of the amazing online activities you can do to engage with developers by Major League Hacking

Sign up for some of the great online Hackathons 👇

• MLH Local HackDay
• MishMash – India’s Largest Diversity Hackathon
• Microsoft Azure Hackathon

Say hi 🖐️ on Twitter and share your feedback on the blog post. Stay tuned for more best practices in the next part of the series. Cheers!