Hackers Unite!

ackathons are magical. Hackathons are non-compulsory, unpaid, but last long enough to warrant overtime pay and a day off in a normal corporate environment. Yet somehow participants are highly engaged, and manage to produce creative solutions in a much tighter timeframe. Why do Hackathons work? What is the differentiating factor from regular work?

The first one is focus. Online entrepreneur and author Jason Fried is very vocal on this matter. He believes work is like sleep. One doesn’t simplygo to sleep, one builds towards sleep. The same applies to work: it takes time to internalise the problem before one can offer an elegant solution. Yet, in a normal day of work, water cooler gossip, meetings, and managers constantly distract workers; similar to how REM sleep cannot occur with constant interruptions, quality work cannot be achieved in most ordinary workplaces.

The second factor is motivation. Dan Pink, bestselling author, gave a great TED talk on “The Puzzle of Motivation”. To motivate one to produce quality creative work, ‘Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose’ beats the ‘Carrots and Sticks’ approach hands down. This proposition is backed by the Glucksberg’s research on “Duncker’s Candle Problem”. In this study, researchers found that incentives only improve performance in straightforward tasks. When it comes to tasks that require creativity, participants that received monetary incentives based on performance actually performed worse than the control group who received no prize! Another study from the Federal Reserve Bank reported that for tasks that called for ‘rudimentary cognitiveskill’, a larger reward “led to poorer performance”. Dan makes the case that ‘Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose’, i.e. to direct one’s own life, to get better at something that matters, and to do something in the service of something larger than oneself, are the true motivators to creative tasks.

The third differentiating factor is that a Hackathon kills procrastination. We all know the coursework takes an hour to finish if we start one hour before the deadline. Without the Hackathon, you can create an idea anytime between now and forever. However, in a Hackathon time is of the essence. “If I don’t join/finish the Hackathon, I will need to do the same task but lose the prizes plus swags plus the job offer”.

Hackathons and similar autonomous work time has proven to be a great innovation catalyst. It has produced a whole array of new products, most famously Google’s GMail, Google News and Facebook’s like button and timeline.

Now back at Imperial, what will differentiate us from the rest of the world? What makes Imperial great? How can we make Imperial better? I believe Imperial will benefit from the same process as

If I don’t join/finish the Hackathon, I will need to do the same task but lose the prizes plus swags plus the job offer

major tech firms have. Therefore, our best hackers are being gathered to build something that works and wows over one weekend.

Last year, the Hackathon at Imperial produced some very interesting products. Heatnote, a new slideshow player, allows students to tag confusing parts of the slide live. Lecturer can thus see in real time which part of the slide requires further clarification. Another winning team created a system that automatically delivers relevant notes to your devices, based on your course and location. As you can see, our hackers have already implemented some great ideas.

For hackers who attended last years’ event, you know how great that was. Our first ever Hackathon last year received rave reviews from Facebook engineers, both on quality and originality. Therefore it is no surprise that Facebook will be mentoring the teams and scouting for talent in the event. This year we are happy to have more heavyweight partners. We are pleased to have Microsoft engineers joining us in the Hackathon, who will be providing mentors and judges, and Oxford Instruments, who will be providing Raspberry Pis for the event. Now we truly have broadened the horizon of possibilities!

Just as any other Hackathons, we will have enough food and snacks to keep everyone going over the weekend. On top of that, we have organiseda few workshops to get you ready. We will have workshops on Git, Mobile Development, Facebook APIs and Raspberry Pis. To help you make a lasting impact, each team will receive a server from us.

While you are free to work on whatever you want (in the true spirit of Autonomy). To qualify for the final, your product must make a real, lasting impact. That means your code will need to be on github, and your service must be able to serve real users after the event.

Of course, no Hackathon is complete without some handsome rewards. We have prepared cash prizes for the winning teams, and we have angel investors ready to take your products to the next level (hopefully not just the winners!). HR from Facebook and Microsoft will be joining us in the after party, I am sure they will be very interested in your CVs.

The Imperial Hackathon will be taking place in January – so get cracking and submit your ideas to

ideas.ichackathon.com.