CloudAppHack-WG
Contents
Cloud Application Hackathon Working Group
CloudAppHack-WG
Overview
The Cloud Application Hackathon working group actively supports community members who wants to organize and run a cloud application hackathon for their community. The working group (WG) will share it’s collective knowledge, exchange of best practices, documentation, and provide mentorship. This WG is a place for hackathon organisers to come and receive planning advice which is practical and helps the organiser achieve event success by leveraging the capabilities of the global OpenStack community.
Goals
- Grow a vibrant and inclusive community of cloud application developers who actively use OpenStack as their cloud application infrastructure platform
- Act as an additional point of contact for guidance in developing a successful, safe, inclusive and rewarding hackathon
- Assist in the organization of OpenStack App Hackathon events in your respective communities and to consolidate global activities
- Facilitate activities correspondent to the App Hackathon wherever we can without impeding the interested group’s schedules or progress
- Build personal relationships between AppDev and DevOps communities (tribes) for the purpose of better understanding how resources are exposed (via API/SDK) and how they are consumed
- Establish AppDev champions who regularly participate and are aware for the wide ranging cloud app techniques and events which produce cloud applications
Goals out of Scope
- Develop Applications, Tools and Services atop OpenStack
Community Contributions
- Encourage the development of a broad OpenStack community and ecosystem of partners in support of DevApp Hackathons
- Facilitate training activities in OpenStack
- Transmit the interested community objectives and ideas to the OpenStack foundation in an easy, fast and organized manner to speed-up the event’s organization
- Provide guidance on the community’s requirements and actively provide contacts who can solve problems stopping progress
- Expectations Management for communities looking forward to run a hackathon
- Provide an up-to-date list of DevApp Hackathon events to the user-committee and maintain an available list of past, present and future hackathons
- Maintain ongoing communication with the user-committee to provide a forum for wider discussion on how the Application Develop Community is growing
- Develop a task timeline for each hackathon and follow up with the interested community group
- Overview the compliance of minimum membership requirements
- Help finding additional stakeholders, sponsors and community collaborators to co-host the event
- Recruit community members who want to be part of an open team that meets and works towards
Organization
Meetings
Every second Tuesday of every month through Google Hangouts
- May 10, 2016
- June 14, 2016
- July 12, 2016
- August 09, 2016
- September 13, 2016
- October 11, 2016
- November 08, 2016
- December 13, 2016
Current Hackathons
- Guadalajara Hackathon
- Prague Hackathon - TBD
- UTSA Hackathon - TBD
Lead Hacker Checklists for Cloud Application Hackathon Event
The 'lead hacker' is responsible for the overall success of the event. You should be a well organised person, able to kindly delegate tasks and humbly ask for help. You will have run events before with an understanding for basic community principles: especially inclusion, kindness and 'a steady hand' when things get stressful.
Your objectives as the "Lead Hacker":
- Assemble a team of event organisers who are passionate for building up your local community.
- Organise weekly/fortnightly meetings to bring the event organising team together to communicate.
- Answer questions daily, being on-call wherever you are needed. Promote, promote, promote.
- Be the cheerleader, help people, do everything you can to make the event a positive organised experience for everyone.
Checklists for the 'Lead Hacker'
The below checklists are intended to provide the minimum viable set of tasks which will need to be completed for the hackathon. Naturally, you will add on additional tasks to make your event even better and we would highly encourage you to create your own checklists and share them back with the community.
Are you ready to help make the world a better place where apps can work on any open cloud?
Pre Event Checklist
To do four months prior to the hackathon taking place:
- Contact the OpenStack Cloud Application Hackathon Working Group to find an Ambassador who can support you throughout the event. A liaison from the OpenStack Foundation will be assigned to support you.
- Recruit the x10 event organisers who will help you achieve a successful hackathon event, show them this repository with a list of checklists for the roles they will need to undertake as part of the event organising team.
- Lock down a venue, i.e. lock down the date and tell a new person every day about the Hackathon. Hint: use any contacts you have at Universities as the Uni will often sponsor the event by donating the space.
- Come up with the main theme (aka "tag line') of your event, how can you get all the "idea people" to come to this event and participate. Your event logo will represent this tag line. Your logo will be used on everything. Hint: what is happening at the time of your planned event, any news headlines likely - be timely!
- Organise a simple one page website with basic instructions on how to get involved. Ask your friendly OpenStack liaison to help provide examples of past events. Don't forget: pictures, video and more pictures.
- Draw up a floorplan to share with everyone showing spaces marked out for: opening ceremony stage, team spaces, food/drink areas, judging areas (if not the stages), and closing ceremony.
- Run regular weekly/fortnightly conference calls to make sure your organising team is on track - have fun, encourage smiles as this event is about having fun with ideas!
- Your hackathon begins with the informal training events which happen once month building up to the event, make sure the cloud and trainers are ready. <-- this is where teams will form.
- Gather team leaders every week to keep updated on advancements and next steps
- Make sure you have all 10 of your event organising team and that they are on course to deliver. One leader is needed for each one of the following concentrations:
- Marketing (Social Media, Website, Physical Propaganda)
- Pre-Trainings
- Sponsors
- Registration and Help-Desk
- Venue-Logistics
- Advocates-Judges
- Mentors
- Cloud, Network, WiFi
- Volunteers
- Community Manager
The process is simplified in the following steps:
Step 1: Interest & Idea
Concept
When
How large
Step 2: Let us Know
Fill out Application Form
Community support
Industry support
Academia support
Other
Step 3: Helps on the way
Identify support members
Project lead
Supporters
Volunteers
Mentors
Judges
Identify facilities or venue
Identify overall requirements
Step 4: Create a plan
Project plan
High-level design
Support commitment
Step 5: Getting serious
Design
Media coverage
Budget and funding
Event Checklist
The following is an example of a 3 day Hackathon event
Hackathon: Day 1
08:00 Cluster setup, Infrastructure
10:00 Settup and Assembly
12:00 Rehearsal
15:00 Start of Activities
15:00 - 22:00: Registration
17:30: Opening Ceremony, Team presentation, Sponsors
17:45: OpenStack Community Presentation
18:00: OpenStack WG+Projects
18:15: Keynote
18:30: Agenda + Rules + Q&A Housekeeping (11pm - 6am)
18:45: Mentors Introduction
19:00: Judges Introduction
19:15: Closure Talk, Coding start!
19:30: Networking Team formation for individual registers. Meet your mentor.
21:00: Mentor’s checkpoint #1 - Meet your mentor + Kickoff
22:00: Dinner
22:00: Team checkpoint: Teams/Tables, Judges needed
24:00: Midnight Snack
Hackathon: Day 2
09:00: Breakfast
09:00: Team’s checkup: Entry form Leaders
10:00: Opening greetings (Day 2, agenda) + Q&A
10:30: Mentor’s checkpoint #2 - Architecting the app
14:00: Lunch
18:30: Mentor’s checkpoint #3 - OpenStack integration & code review
20:00: Dinner
24:00: Midnight Snack
Hackathon: Day 3
09:00: Breakfast
10:00: Opening greetings (Day 3, agenda) + Q&A
10:30: Mentor’s checkpoint #4 - Deployment
13:00: Coding stops!
13:00 - 14:00: Mentor’s checkpoint #5 - Teams prepare their pitch + deliverables and submit to judges
13:00 Mentors and Judges (Pre-selection mentors assignment)
14:00 - 15:00: Pre-selection round
- In parallel, each team will present to its assigned judge and they will be graded using the rubric, selecting the best 3 to 5 apps to the finals
9 mins per team including Q&A
15:00: Lunch + teams pitch rehearsal (after their presentation with judges)
15:00 - 16:00: Mentors focus group (Research study)
15:00 - 16:00: Judge's deliberation (Leaders and Judges) and selection of the best 3 to 5 apps to the finals
15:15: Get the teams top ten and Leader announces them (#topsecret)
15:30: leaders entertaining participants #FunnyHack Explaining RankTab
16:00 - 16:30: Finalist announcement
16:00 - 16:15: Teams goes up at stage 16:30: Finals
- The 3 to 5 best teams will be pitch their app to the audience
- 10 minutes per team (3 min pitch/demo, 2 min to evaluate)
- 5 min team to set up
17:30: Audience will select the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place.
- The selection will be thru votes with an electronic app, token or paper ballots; selecting the 1 to 3 the best apps, like the process to select the name of the next release of OpenStack.
- In case of a draw, judges will have the final decision.
18:00: Awards ceremony
- Thanks to
- Sponsors - Judges - Mentors
19:00: Closing Celebration + Cocktail
Post Event Checklist
- Send hackathon event survey
- Provide survey results to upcoming hackathon events leaders
Additional Resources, Examples and Precedents
- Example from Guadalajara's Hackathon
Hackathon Experience Video Frequently Asked Questions Guide Guadalajara Hackathon Portal
- Interesting resource worth reading.
- Some precedents of how other open communities do this.
- A helpful person worth contacting and having a chat.
- Why use checklists? Humans are not great at remembering stuff, this is how mistakes happen, people forget things when they are in stressful situations (like events), checklists are great for focusing the mind and result in significant productivity gains. Read more about this in a book called, 'The Checklist Manifesto'.
Contact Information
Co-Presidents - Newton Release
Michael Jenkins
Skype: michael.jenkins886 md.jenkins@icloud.com LinkedIn: https://tw.linkedin.com/in/mjenkins3
Gonzalo De La Torre
US: (210) 837-0335 Skype: gonzalo-de-la-torre Google Hangouts: latioz@gmail.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gonzaloutsa