Wikimedia Hackathon 2017/Lessons Learned

Lessons learned from the feedback survey, Phabricator task and organizers will be posted on this page later. Please watch the page if you would like to see what we have learned about organizing hackathons!

This page is a combination of feedback from a survey sent to participants and ideas from the organizers.

This page will focus heavily on improvements for next time and things that went poorly. However remember that 100% of the participants that responded to the feedback survey stated that their overall experience with the hackathon was either "Positive" or "Very Positive."

Suggested changes for the next Wikimedia Hackathon
 * 3 registration forms instead of 1: scholarships, hackathon registration, accommodation.

The best!:

The worst!:

Visas
As a host, you will have do help participants get visas. Each (host) country has different processes, so make sure to know how your country's process works well in advance, before you even open the scholarship registration.

WMAT gathered the information about 2 months in advance. This helped a lot because things always get stressful in the end with last minute registrations/ participants.

Feedback survey background

 * rfarrand created the feedback survey using google forms based on feedback survey questions from past events.
 * The Feedback Survey was sent out to participants on May 23rd, 2017
 * A reminder was sent to participants on XXX
 * The Feedback Survey closed on XXX
 * The survey received XX responses (XX% response rate)

Considerations for next year
This section is based on the fill-in-the-blank/comment sections of the feedback form. Some of these comments will be contradictory. We are mostly trying to include common themes and issues that were felt by groups of people. This section is a bit more subjective than the  section below and suggestions may be paraphrased and combined with each other.

Suggestions from Newcomers
(only answered by people who had attended 0 or 1 hackathons in the past)

Changes for opening and closing sessions
Suggestions for opening Suggestions for closing / showcase

What participants liked most:
(Listed in order by most mentioned) (mentioned by one person)

What participants liked the least:
(Listed in order by most mentioned) (mentioned by one person)

Hackathon Accomplishments
This section is copy / past with some people's answers removed if they did not add anything.

Data
...