== The combination of newcomers and experienced people seemed to work ==
We got two different notes in the exit survey about this -- one from a person who said they were happy working in the big open main room and didn't feel distracted by noise, and from another person who said they went off because they found the main room too noisy.
I did really like being able to send people to nearby experienced folks to have a chat. This was especially helpful as I walked around and asked people what they wanted help on, or what they wanted to work on.
I did notice some experienced people, by the second day, had wandered off to quieter rooms than the big main room. I'm glad we had those rooms. (I'd love to hear from those people if they felt "pushed out", or if they instead felt happy that the quieter rooms were available.)
I went off to a quieter room because I felt that the main room was too loud and busy, plus the lack of working wifi made working very difficult. The side room had just the right number of people and activity to make me feel like I could be productive, as well as speedy access.
== We made a good impression by just running the event ==
One prospective attendee who, sadly, couldn't make it, indicated to me that just by reading the survey we sent to prospective attendees, and skimming the list of tasks, it was something that they'd be interested in attending, and that it was great that such an event was going on. In particular, they suggested it felt more like a "play-with-stuff-a-thon" rather than a "hack-a-thon", and described that as making them feel welcome.
If anything, we should have capitalized on this more. I heard from other prospective attendees that they didn't know the Hackathon was intended to be newcomer-friendly this year.
Personally, I think the term "Hackathon" gives an exclusionary vibe, and that a newcomer-oriented event should have a different name. For example, Boston Ruby recently started using "project night" at our (OpenHatch's) suggestion and it seems to have gone well for them: https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/the-steps-boston-ruby-is-taking-to-become-fr...
I like the idea of calling it "project night" or "tech days" or something.
== Logistics concerns ==
The room that we had agreed we would use turned out not to have power strips lining the bottom of every table, so we switched rooms and had to update signs across the event.
Some exit survey respondents indicated they wanted the event to start later in the morning, and that they wanted the room to not close at 6pm.
I would second that. Early mornings are tough for me, being a lazy west coast person.
== Tutorials can use TAs ==
On the second day, I found volunteeres to be "TAs" for the tutorials. Their job was to wander around and help people with environment problems or people just having trouble following along because e.g. their web browser was different than the one being used by the presenter.
Another difficulty I found was that sometimes a tutorial speaker wasn't loud enough to be audible in the back of the room.
This is above the tasks I had labeled as needed for a "Talkmeister": http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon/Volunteers#Talkmeister
Also, people who are having problem following along during a tutorial don't always speak up. I'm glad we added the TAs, although I think further work is required to find out how to non-intrusively convince people that asking questions is okay. The best way I've seen is to have a very small group, no bigger than 10, preferably about six people. I almost wonder if we'd be better-served to use pre-recorded video tutorials with a lot of TAs available, rather than live lecturers. Then we could easily have small group rooms, and could pause the video.
I like this idea - as well as the idea of having informal tutoring - like a table of people who want to learn about a topic I am experienced at (like puppet) and then doing some more one on one work. Maybe some signs on tables like "Wednesday afternoon, Bot table" to encourage folks interested in one topic to join up together?
Leslie