We’d like to begin hosting and/or collaborating in virtual hackathons as a way to increase contributions to projects we support.
There are many projects and communities going virtual in this time of Covid, the WordPress charity format, do_action, could work well as they already provide other elements we’d like to incorporate.
We couldn’t call the events do_action, but we’ve been encouraged by the organizers to fork and remix their format
For example, we can tweak some of the following ideas –
Format
- Organize a country-wide event. Since these events are going to be virtual, it makes sense to bring in talents from the whole country, as well as reach more organizations that would otherwise be possible.
- Spread the work out over a few days/weeks. In order to give people the time to work on the websites for the stations, allow them to work over a longer time period than just one day.
- Provide virtual communication channels. Use your local WordPress community Slack group (or create one if you don’t have one already) and set up separate channels for each team to communicate.
Participant Roles
Not sure this has been addressed (in-person vs virtual do_action)… having completely separate teams per org might be a bit messy and inefficient for a countrywide/global, virtual event
In our case, we’d probably want to identify roles and participants who can work across all projects.
So a variation on the roles referenced –
- Project Manager
- Content Creator
- Social Media Manager
- Designer
- Site Configuration
- Quality Assurance Tester
- Documentation
- Fundraising
- Development (this work would primarily be as part of the OSS projects themselves)
With several other projects/communities needing a similar process, there’s potential to pool resources for anyone interested in taking this on.