On 18/08/11 21:05, Richard Farmbrough wrote:
I would be interested in a UK Hackathon, and there are a fair number of heavy-duty UK techies, I suppose the way forward would be a weekend event, and the crux would be, primarily, suitable premises.
- Good wifi, plenty of mains outlets.
- Food and drink
- Presentation facilities
- Cheap accommodation
- Reasonably easy to get to (this is always a problem in the UK of course)
Perhaps the best way is to start small but scalable?
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Glad to hear your interested :)
I'm speaking with the most likely venue tomorrow, as their designated person is in office Mondays and Fridays. The venue has Wifi, not sure about mains outlets, but the lady from the venue said its used for hackathon like events a fair bit, so they should have plenty.
Food and drink, I've been asking people, and generally from what I've heard, snacks and lunch are provided by the organisers, and dinner people go off with their new friends, or by themselves to get dinner and drinks...
Presentations - I've heard at past events they've not had the right balance of presentations to coding/hacking, and that there were too many. So I'm going to have to work that out, but after I've got the venue and date confirmed (next week or two), then I'll put out a call for speakers and see how many talks we want. Apparently the space is small enough not to require microphones, but if any speaker specificly wants to use one, let me know way in advance! Venue will be providing a projector for us.
Getting there - this venue I'm looking at is a 6 minute walk (mostly downhill slightly) from Brighton Station, cars are ok, as I think there's a big car park nearby (a few roads away), but don't hold me to this!
Accommodation - I'm going to leave that up to people to arrange, I'll put a few sites on the page when venue and date is up, but its not my strong point, I live a 30 minute bus ride away, so its never been something I've looked at, I know theres some (not so cheap?) hotels along the seafront, but I'll go in and have a look for other things if/when I go to checkout the venue in person. I know in past hackathons people have arranged group offers for their attendees, but thats not something I personally am going to be able to do, if someone is worried about accommodation, poke me, and feel free to go scope out a cheap place where we can book people into where needs be.
Any other questions, comments etc, they are all welcome!
-- Lewis Cawte