Putting Plans to Work: Best Practices for Hackathon Demo Days

For anyone who enjoys (or has a knack for) planning, organizing a hackathon is not terribly difficult: it?s a matter of understanding your goals, assessing needs, and figuring out how to bridge the two. Naturally, this is much easier said than done. The most important part of a hackathon, by far, are the demos. Why else -- it?s what makes the event worth attending in the first place. Sponsoring companies wouldn?t offer money to anything that didn?t provide exposure. Developers wouldn?t forsake sleep if they couldn?t show an eager audience the hacks they built overnight. Pulling off demos at Photo Hack Day and Photo Hack Day 2, for example, has proven to be a continuous learning process, with a much more public (and much less forgiving) learning curve. There?s no need to be a n00b, I?ve done a lot of the screwing up for you.

joe torre west virginia university michele bachmann jessica biel tim howard west virginia rob roy