Let’s begin…
Last year, I wrote a piece on my Hackathon Journey. I wrote about my lack of computer science knowledge, my introduction to hackathons, and ultimately, my love for one particular hackathon called HackBeanpot. After concluding another year on the organizing team, this year as President, I wanted to write a reflection on this year. As an organization, I feel like we did so many new things, and I learned so much along the way.
For some background…
Last year I was on the sponsorship team of HackBeanpot. We were responsible for talking to companies and selling them on our idea of a hackathon. These companies would send mentors and host talks in return for sponsoring our small 501c3 non-profit with some money to spend on free meals for all the hackers. I loved being on the sponsorship team because I really got to understand how hard it is to raise money for a free event. I learned how to cold call people, write concise emails and talk to sponsors to get them excited and interested in our event.
My first few weeks as president
After being on the team for a year, I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to put into motion. Transitioning into a leadership role was something that was definitely scary for me. I had never really led a team or even a meeting before. Luckily, I had a really supportive team who really helped me through every step of the process. After each of the first few meetings, Ashna (the VP) and I would debrief with Noah and Bahar(support team/experienced Beanpotters) to figure out how the meeting went and what could be improved.
We realized that as leadership, it was really important to have frequent meetings discussing how the meetings were going. Concurrently, each of the team leads were meeting with their individual small teams. For many of them, it was also their first time leading small teams, and we realized that everyone was feeling just a tad bit lost. It was difficult to gauge how new team members were feeling, and it resulted in an unsatisfactory feedback loop. To solve this, the team leads and leadership started meeting weekly. We had really productive sessions of talking about logistics, and larger scale thoughts on the organization and conversations about how to be a good leader.
Starting some leadership 1–1's
After understanding how productive these team lead meetings were, we decided to start 1–1’s with team leads as well. Every week, Ashna and I would have a 1–1 call with one of the team leads. We created a basic set of questions we would ask each team lead that would naturally start other conversations about goals each team lead had, or ways to improve the overall organization. These conversations provided a safe space to bring up issues and talk about achievements, which is something that is really important to any organization, especially one that is pretty small. We continued these 1–1’s throughout most of the year!
The long.term.vision and all its glory!
Another large project that Ashna and I took on related to the long-term vision of HackBeanpot. When I first became president, I think I was pretty invested in the long term health of the organization. Ashna had been on the team a lot longer than me, and had an even greater interest in it. Together, I think we really wanted to figure out what HackBeanpot meant to the Boston community, and how to push that vision forward even after we graduated. To concretely achieve this, we decided to create a long-term vision and a larger set of values that HackBeanpot believes are at its core.
The coolest part of HackBeanpot is that every year the team changes and every year, the event and the team has its own personality. When creating this long-term vision, we wanted to keep that essence intact, while still setting a base for years to come. This was an interesting gray area that we definitely struggled with. It was really easy for us to come up with implementation for each of our long term vision ideas. “Have multiple hackathons a year”, “have more alumni events”, etc. We had to abstract these one level and created themes for each of these implementation categories. This allowed us to paint broader strokes, as well as give some examples of implementation in the 2 year and 5 year frameworks. We ended up creating a long term vision for both the event, as well as the organizing team.
After working on the long term vision, we thought it was important to share this with the team, since they would be the ones to carry it forward in the future years. We want this to be something that is not set in stone, but a groundwork for future leadership to experiment with. Overall, this was a really exciting process to work on. I think there is room to improve, but hopefully we have created something that the future leadership can work on!
The internal mission statement
Last year, after a couple of weeks of working, a natural internal mission statement sort of emerged. We called it “taking risks with some calculation and intention”. This year, we wanted to create a more intentional mission statement that propelled each small team and gave them inspiration for their work. At the beginning of the year, all of the team leads and leadership did a lot of brainstorming to figure out what this internal mission statement would be. After a lot of iteration, we decided on cultivating relationships that foster growth. We decided that the mission statement should be intentionally broad, and I think it worked out pretty well! It helped the design team create an event theme for the first time ever (sprout)! In return, this theme really pushed us to become a very sustainable event and even challenged us to think outside of the box for prizes. It was really cool to see how something we worked on so early in the year could dictate a decent portion of the event!
To wrap it up…
The event itself went above and beyond my expectations. We paid close attention to processes that went not so smoothly last year, and improved some of those processes a lot. HackBeanpot really prides itself on giving each hacker a really customized, friendly experience and that takes a lot of time to craft on the back end. We put a lot of time into making sure each hour of the schedule was thought out, each meal was high quality, and each item of swag was created with intention.
It was incredibly rewarding to see so many cool projects that sprouted (hah) out of this hackathon. I am so lucky to have such an incredible team that worked so hard to make this event possible. As someone who has been to a decent amount of hackathons, I invite everyone to go to at least one, and if you like it, try organizing one! There is something very exciting and fulfilling to be able to put on a community event that brings a lot of people together to do something they love.
I am graduating in May, and I am very sad to be leaving this team. I have made so many great friends, and learned so.much.stuff in the past two years. I think I owe a lot of my self-improvement to this team and the structure it has provided in my life. I’m really excited for this next chapter in my life, and I hope that I can continue participating in events like this.
