Projects Overview

The following was borrowed and adapted from the excellent SnowEx Hackathon 2021

This section contains everything you need to know about hackweek projects.

Purpose of the projects:

During the course we will be facilitating team hacking sessions in the second half of each day. The purpose of these sessions is for participants to gain hands-on experience in working together on a well-defined problem, in a collaborative space where you can talk things through and get help.

What is hacking?

Hacking is a session of focused, highly collaborative work time – often involving coding – in which the group creates conditions for rapid absorption of new ideas and methods. The word “hack” or “hackathon” has many different interpretations, both positive and negative. Here our intention is to foster the idea of hacking as a fun, interactive and welcoming environment to explore and experiment with computer code.

How will the projects be conducted?

Participants are invited to start conversations about projects in the Slack channel 2023-hackweek-projects before and during week one of the course.

• If you have a project idea brewing, please pitch it in this channel. You can tag your proposed teammates if you already have that worked out.
• Start a thread with “Project idea:” and then provide a few sentences. Include whether you are looking for teammates to join this project. Others who are interested can respond in a thread.
• We welcome a broad range of project topics. People often use project time to dig deeper into concepts introduced in tutorials, to explore problems within their own research, or to advance community data sharing and software building efforts.
• The course team is here to help you get clear on project ideas and decide on what is possible within 5 days.

At the end of week 1 of the course we will have a “Pitchfest”” where proposer(s) can pitch their idea. At this time we will finalize the project teams for the week — however we will provide times when team members will move and work with other teams. This kind of ‘cross-pollination’ helps everyone learn and solve problems.

Team hacktime will begin on week 2.

Each team is encouraged to identify a project lead, likely the person who pitched the idea, who has knowledge of the datasets and the specific problem to be explored. But roles can be assigned as the group decides to best fit skills and needs.

On the final day of the course, each team will present their work in a series of lightning talks.