

How Carnegie Mellon Created a More Inclusive Hackathon - socialengineer
https://plus.google.com/u/0/100523810376335283165/posts/NJKcmsB99Aa

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jessepollak
At the Claremont Colleges (outside of LA, includes Pomona, Harvey Mudd, CMC,
Scripps, and Pitzer), we've had success with almost the exact same strategy.
At our last hackathon, we had a similar turnout (150+) and ratio (>1/3 women).
Just to emphasize again the key things that worked for us:

* a commitment to beginners from the start

* a week of 2-hour classes (Hack Week) on building web applications from scratch targeted at non-developers

* a focus on learning rather than winning (although, we did advertise prizes)

* helpful mentors on call through out the tutorials and hackathon

* providing healthy food for those who wanted it

* having a diverse set of organizers, mentors and company reps who participants feel comfortable approaching during _and before_ the hackathon to allay concerns about their participation

In my opinion, every single one of these things makes hackathons a better
experience for _everyone_ , so there's no reason not to do them. To say the
least, we've had no problem with scaring away the typical "hackathon types"
and this year, we're hoping to get close to a 50% ratio.

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Permit
This is an excellent post and it's a shame it seems to be getting flagged.

Not only does it address problems in diversity in technology, but it provides
concrete, repeatable steps to help improve the situation. It sounded like the
hackathon was better for all involved, and not only the people they sought to
include.

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jessepollak
I would guess that it set off the voting ring detectors (rather than people
manually flagging it; that would be pretty fucked up).

Sometimes, for posts like this that seem beneficial for everyone, I wish PG
could just manually disable them...but that's a slippery slope to say the
least.

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minikites
> We told people what a hackathon was. - We didn't tell people about the type
> of person that we expected at a hackathon.

That's a good way to be inclusive in general, not just for hackathons.

