EA - EA London Hackathon Retrospective by Jonny Spicer

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA London Hackathon Retrospective, published by Jonny Spicer on February 17, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.IntroductionOn Saturday 11th February, we ran a day-long EA hackathon in London, modeled off a similar event in Berkeley late last year. This post follows a similar format to the retrospective linked above. You can see some of the basic information about the event, as well as notes on some of the projects that people were working on in this Google doc.We are incredibly grateful to Nichole Janeway Bills and Zac Hatfield-Dodds for their advice before the event, and to Edward Saperia for his advice and assistance on the day itself.TL:DR;We ran a pilot hackathon in London, and were surprised by the success of the event.Around 50 people turned up, they gave mostly positive feedback, there were several impressive projects which have plausible impact.The event helped build the EA London tech community and generated opportunities for community members to work on impactful software projects on an ongoing, long-term basis.We're excited to continue running these kinds of events and want to produce a blueprint for others to run similar hackathons in other places.Goals of the eventWhile we hoped that this event would produce artifacts that had legible impact, it was mainly a community-building exercise. Our primary goal was to validate the concept - could we run a successful hackathon? If so, would running similar events in the future lead to greater tangible impact, even if this one didn't necessarily do so?What went wellApproximately 50 people attended, which was more than we'd expected.The average skill level was high.The majority of teams had a strong lead or mentor, in most cases an existing maintainer or the person who had the original idea for the project.Asking people if they'd like to be put in groups and then doing so generally worked well - I would estimate this was beneficial for 80% of the people who selected this option. See related potential improvement below.Dedicating one of the monthly EA London tech meetups to brainstorming ideas for hackathon projects both yielded good ideas and got people engaged.Having a show & tell section encouraged attendees to optimize for having something concrete, and gave groups the chance to learn about what other groups had worked on.The venue was excellent.The average overall rating for the event on our feedback form was 4.36/5 .What we could do better next timeWe had a limited budget, and more people showed up then we could provide food for on said budget, meaning we didn't provide lunch after we'd originally said we would. We weren't transparent about this, which was a mistake.We didn't do enough to accommodate those who were less experienced coders. In future, we'll use a different question on the sign-up form, along the lines of "how much guidance would you need in order to complete an issue in a project that required coding?". We can then organise our groups/projects/activities accordingly, including having more ways to contribute to projects through means other than coding.We underestimated the ratio of people with jobs in the "data" family relative to the "software" family, and so our suggested projects were almost entirely software-focused.We could've had a better shared digital space. This ended up being a bit of an afterthought for us, and we ended up asking people to join a WhatsApp group when they signed in, but it wasn't used much during the day. A different platform could facilitate more collaboration/visibility between groups, allow people to ask for help more easily, and generally give more of a community feel to the event.Outputs and resourcesThere were several pull requests submitted to existing open-source projects, including VeganBootcamp and Stampy.Multiple proof-of-concep...