Hackathons as a Service

WHY DID WE DECIDE TO ORGANISE THEM?

For the past few years the IT world has become very popular and a lot of Hackathons, which were organised locally, were noticed in BEST. So after a project called “Research on Competitions”, which was conducted in 2017 by Competitions Department, the conversation slowly started. In the meantime, a need to innovate in our core services was identified, which made exploring the possibility of Hackathons as a BEST service more realistic.

WHAT IS THE ACTUAL STAGE OF IMPLEMENTATION OF HACKATHONS AS A SERVICE?

Right now we’re going into the testing phase of the service concept. What this means is that the concept will be introduced to LBGs and hopefully one or more events will be organised in order to see it into action and have proper data to implement changes, make it more feasible and finally introduce it as an official BEST service.

WHAT HAVE WE DONE SO FAR?

For the past two to three years, a lot of discussions have been made revolving around Hackathons as a Service. However, before we moved on with anything, we needed to analyse the actual feasibility of this event as a BEST service. Due to this reason, Hackathons as a Service Project was formed and for six months, a few experienced BESTies paved the way to the creation of a service concept. Now, we are at the stage of having it ready and we are going to test it with the appropriate methods.

HAVE YOU ALREADY THOUGHT ABOUT WAYS TO IMPLEMENT THEM ONLINE?

Hackathons are relatively easy to be “transferred” to an online environment. The main part of the competition, which is solving the tasks, either way takes place in front of a computer, so you can do them online and still offer a similar experience to the participants. A way to improve them would be to include some career-related activities and get the participants in touch with the company world. Companies can also offer prizes, which are always appealing. As for the technical aspect of the event, the most interactive platform so far is Discord.