Planning the M+ Online Hackathon: Challenges, Highlights, and Key Takeaways
By: Mary Lo
Tags: Museums, Digital, Events, Hackathons, Musetech

Provide onboarding support on the first day

M+ Online Hackathon, a digital collaborative programme, was completely new to our participants. Hence, it was important for us to give onboarding support to them, including by covering the online tools and providing the event schedule and the expected gains from the programme. We created several self-help materials, such as a guideline illustrating the essential functions of our selected tools, a digital booklet with the schedule and a description of the event, as well as useful resource references and a project-outline document. But documents alone were not enough — we also needed to demonstrate the usage of tools to participants to confirm that they understood what was going on. In our case, Kate gave a quick tutorial on how to use the platforms during the introductory session on Day 1.

Understanding participants ahead of the event

Our target participants were students, designers, artists, technologists, and cultural enthusiasts. However, we did not have a deep understanding of the participants. To understand them more, we collected information about their skill sets by sending out a questionnaire to each of them one week before the event. The responses helped facilitators adjust the event materials and the wording of the presentations. Even though we collected information ahead of time, we did not have a clear picture of the participants until the event began. Moreover, we designed M+ Online Hackathon as a collaborative event. In our plan, participants should work in teams of four. We grouped individual participants into teams based on their skill sets, but we were still faced with a challenge: how could we help team members feel a sense of connection through a screen? We used brainstorming sessions and ice-breaker tasks to solve this problem (details are explained in the next part!).

Keep the momentum going!

As organisers, we actively managed the event flow and monitored different teams’ progress from behind the scenes. We worked with facilitators to virtually assist participants, such as by helping them form their teams, reaching out to unresponsive participants, encouraging team members to connect and exchange ideas, and making sure each team was constantly progressing without dropping behind. As teams could not easily meet face to face, we tried to replicate the experience through a virtual environment where people could work together with a set of online tools. There were, however, still some online communication gaps among different parties due to time differences and the event duration. We set up Slack channels for each team and one bigger Slack channel for posting event reminders. We also set up individual online meeting rooms for each team on Hopin, which members could freely use to have video chats with their teammates. We also invited people to sit in on breakout sessions if possible, so they could learn from other teams and gain more inspiration.

Network failures and technical issues

It was essential to rehearse before the event. With the drafted rundown, we did a mock-up with the facilitators to test the tools and get ourselves prepared for the event setting. Different issues were spotted. To solve these, we adjusted the rundown to achieve the target time distribution, and we also made sure the browser’s security setting confirmed that the video-sharing function was not blocked. There were, however, still some unanticipated issues, such as network failures and a computer breakdown. Fortunately, we worked simultaneously in pairs — Kate and I as one pair and our two facilitators as another pair — and when one of us faced any issues, another person would handle the event and help solve the problem by communicating through the Slack channel.

Despite the unexpected incidents, we are grateful that those issues did not create a significant impact on the event, and M+ Online Hackathon was able to run smoothly over the course of its two weeks.