This article is an excerpt from a longer piece originally posted on Medium. Click here for the full story.
“Hackathons.” That’s one of the most popular answers to a question you haven’t asked yet: How do you organize your local tech community to do X/attend Y/engage with Z?
For several years now, hackathons — gatherings of programmers (and, sometimes, issue-area practitioners) for deep dives into particular data-sets, problems, or concepts — have been deployed like flytraps, tenuously designed to attract and entertain developers so that “tech” could be tied to this or that event, with extra cool points assigned for maximizing opportunities for free labor and “community building”. But hackathons(and their kin, code nights) aren't the only way to attract and engage your local tech community — particularly when it comes to civic tech. Crafting high-quality civic technology — projects and tools designed with social impact in mind — requires thought, creativity, and intentionality — the strength to ask, “Will this project actually have social impact? Is it being designed for the social/cultural/political context in which it will be implemented? And if not, what steps do we need to take and what people do we need to substantially involve to get there?” Our approach to community-building in the name of civic tech should be the same.
In this case study, we’ll review how open format models (like hackathons and unconferences) can be remixed and reinvented to encourage an outpouring of “non-traditional” engagement with civic tech without alienating tech veterans. Our focus: The Tech Embassy, an event that took place in 2014 during Washington, DC’s first-ever Funk Parade. (Yes, that’s right: A “Funk Parade” with a civic tech agenda.)
[Full Piece] So You Think You Want to Run A Hackathon? Think Again.
