---
# System prepended metadata

title: nf-core/outreach team meeting - hackathon recap
tags: [meetings, ' hackathon', ' outreach']

---

---
title: nf-core/outreach
tags: meetings, outreach, hackathon
date: 2024-04-11
---

## Agenda

- feedback form for site organizers
- general recap
  - from core/outreach
  - from other organizers
- Improvement suggestions
- Building hackathon toolboxes
  - for distributed hackathons with sites
  - for online hackathons
  - for on-site hackathons
    - big ones (bi-yearly together with Seqera)
    - small ones (to be used for community organized hackathons)

## feedback for site organizers
- Geraldine presented the WIP feedback form

## General recap

### core/outreach

- Geraldine has drafted a survey for getting feedback site organisers (**Sending out end of day or monday! Ask Geraldine directly if you want to look again**)
  - (Sign up) Was it clear what you needed to do for organising
  - (Sign up) Was it clear to sign up as a site; how to get paritipants to sign up
  - (Attendance) How many people didn't turn up; do you know why?
  - (Overall) Overall experience
  - (Challenges) what was most challenging?
  - (Future) What can we do better to help for next time?
  - (General) any other comments?
  - (Extras) Timely stickers; enough stickers; stickers popularity; Pizza procedure;
- Ken has drafted a survey for participants (**Also aiming for end of day**)
  - Site location; experience; overall happiness

 - Fran: assumed some things were already tackled by Seqera but job description/task assignments in core organisers not clear

### Other organizers

- What were the site organisers experiences?
  - Florian: gather.town way of meeting people of some form more organically would be better particularly for online-only
      - also main feedback from Metaomics meeting
  - Júlia: as a project lead, difficult to help (new) people during their working hours as the person was not in Júlia's Time Zone
    - Geraldine: maybe specify TZ of the lead(s) of each project in description -> make clear can work outside of that but make clear expectations
  - Jose: also had project leads in AUS as well as EU, even though each group had their own dyanmics, they could still work well together with reviews
  - Florian: also had cross TZ teams, meeting each other first time _before_ the hackathon was effective to distribute tasks/expectations, e.g. defining 'squads'
    - Fran: but risk of harder to switch between?
    - Florian: but most people didn't switch
  - Lorena: have an option to indicate which days you will attend -> make it clear you _can_ come one  day if that's all you can do (some people all three days is too much)
    - Can easily add in sign up form 

## Improvement suggestions

### Pre-meeting thoughts

- have deputies for any step on the way, there should always be more than one person that knows how to do something and has the credentials to do so
  - have a list of responsible people
  - better definition of tasks/responsibilities (E.g. zoom set up; site organiser contact point)
- inform project leads and site organizers earlier about what is expected and what is available for them

### Meeting suggestions

- Time zones is always hard, as with integrating local and online
- Too much reliant on Phil, worked it out, but Phil dependency not great long-term
- Have **Two** main primary organisers
- Project leads / site organisers were not informed early enough how everything should work 
- Chris: timeline would be helpful in the toolbox
- Jose: projects more advanced in time (minimum one week _before_ hackathon)? 
  - Fran: but most people _submit_ them last minute
  - Florian: should make it easier to sign up in the first place, list of projects were long way down the page, and make it easier for project leads to see who is in the project ('Join the project' button). Maybe have a dedicated/special page
  - Matthias: had hoped the slack channels would do that
  - Florian: feels it was too involved to get to that in the first place
  - Fran: distinction between project proposals vs project participations
  - Margherita: there was a deadline for making propsoals! But it always says 'but you can do it afterwards' -> maybe don't tell people that OR say if you propose it after deadline then you risk not having many people helping out
  - Margherita: main problem was all participatns were beginners, and even with prompting to ask in Slack, tendency was always to ask her (the expert)
  - Lorena:  Could have been better in Boston but weren't sure -> too many beginners; tried to say we will help but you should do the training; toolkit/box should have a list of good resources for resources the site organiser can share (e.g. training, which slack stuff)
  - James: offering on-site on first day training helped reduce
  - Fran: but we explciitly say it's not training
  - Geraldine: we are missing intermediate training (between beginners and advanced) which probably doesn't help -> have material to help organisers 'avoid' this if they aren't interested
  - Lorena: make it also clearer what are the 'easy' projects for people to work on/in
  - Matthias: tried to tell people to include in project descriptions what are the skill level of the project
  - Geraldine: people coming in person will generally expect a certain level of in-person help from site organisers

## Hackathon toolkit/box

- Who is interested in helping out with this?
  - would require several meetings and work outside of these meetings
- Where/How should this information be made available?
- what kind of information should be included?
  - outlines of content
  - schedules and important deadlines
  - macros for information mails
  - step by step instructions for organizers
  - step by step instructions for co-organizers (site organizers, project organzers / if applicable)
  - step by step instructions for participants
  - important login instructions and passwords if applicable (needs to be closed content)

### distributed hackathons with sites

- [first rough outline, WIP](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Hb92_HOUxJZ3yS9RDRliBx_gFWSRcQxyqKPdsCChYwU/edit?tab=t.0)

### online hackathons

### on-site hackathons

#### Big on-site hackathons (bi-yearly together with Seqera)

#### Small on-site hackathons (to be used for community organized hackathons)