Centering Orgs at the Event

Tactical ways to keep movement leaders and their expertise at the forefront of your hackathon activities and conversations

If you’re lucky, you’re about to get a few hundred people in a room who have already opted in to learning about this problem and working on it, and you have an amazing opportunity to help onboard them to this movement’s community for the long haul. This hackathon is about making space, so the resistance groundwork and its leaders can fill it.

You can do this a few ways:

• Ask an organization to give a keynote intro after you give the introduction to the functional details of the weekend.

• Invite organization staff to walk around to the different teams to find out what they’re working on and offer feedback.

• On Saturday, ask organizations to give lightning talks on their mission or a core issue they encounter in their work during lunch.

• Invite an organization leader (especially an elder!) to give a short keynote talk or fireside chat before demos start on Sunday.

• Invite organizations to be your “judges” and give feedback after demos.

True magic can happen when the voices of people who traditionally don’t get the mic in tech spaces now fill the room.

You’ll find that when the final day of your hackathon is done you’ve now put hundreds of people through a weekend bootcamp on an issue that matters to your community, and to our world. Now they’ll take this experience, relationships, and knowledge back with them to their workplaces, communities, and decisions about where their volunteering and donations can do greater good.