Sharing the experience of building an inclusive event to serve the students of Florida International University. This is a modified version of my retrospective on Medium.
MangoHacks was founded by Juan Alvarado and Alexis Calatayud in 2015. Juan Alvarado, a seasoned hackathon veteran, noticed that the events hosted in the Miami area were too focused on pitching rather than creation.
In parallel, the student hacker movement was catalyzing across multiple universities due to the rise in popularity of MHacks and PennApps. As a result, Florida based hackathons started to take shape and transport students to each of those events: resulting in a tight knit community.
I attended my first event fresh from the turn on 2016: HackFSU 3. On Feb 2nd 2016; I discovered what Computer Science was really about, programming jokes, Soylent and great company. The days after- I rushed to find out how I can help out with organizing FIU’s own hackathon and there I was, responsible to get Mangoes when none could be found.
Florida International University is a commuter school with an acceptance rate hovering around 55 percent. Being a state school in Florida, the university's mandate is to educate the students of South Florida while providing a global education. Since it is not a specialized engineering university, many of the students don't have existing context about programming and engineering.
As a result, universities usually resemble two types: are they "talent agencies" or "bootcamps". This is a concept explored better by Dr. Dan Zhang's Quora response. The likelihood of a talented software developer who has been programming since an early age is higher at Penn than FIU: which is not to say there are none at FIU. Rather, the FIU student's passion for software development wasn't discovered yet.
Because of that: MangoHacks originated from a movement. Or rather an open table, culminating from sustained effort from multiple clubs with the then latent desire to participate in the information economy. In layman's terms: programming with your friends is fun.
The organizing team and I knew that we were never going to be a hackathon that epitomized the competitive spirit. During this time, there was also the focus from certain organizers to create mega-hackathons. Instead, we wanted to be the most fun hackathon that was also most likely the participant's first hackathon. As such: we focused our efforts within that positioning.
Participants in the zone.
One year on from the event's founding: the word of mouth spread and attracted more participants from beyond the state's boundaries. At the time, I was co-directing with Juan and we spent more time on polishing the event and experience. The slight change of the attendee profile made us spend more effort on the check-in experience and the judging of the projects.
This is notable because over time: the expectations rose. MangoHacks was growing in its shoes beyond a charming haphazard event short on snacks, to accepting the responsibility it had in being a steward of the hackathon spirit.
After MangoHacks 2017, the old organizing team was ready to move on and graduate. I feel it is oft mentioned the amount of stress that putting on one of these events do to you. Organizing a hackathon of any magnitude is one of consistent worry. It was time for MangoHacks Founder Juan Alvarado to retire and pass on the reins to me. In terms of the returning team, it was just myself.
Luckily, there was an enterprising young student by the name of Cesia who approached Juan and started listing the ways on how MangoHacks 2017 was inadequate. In short that was what we needed. Cesia became my new Co-Director and we began our work.