A multiple-day event in which people (mostly EA’s) work to solve a set of problems. These problems can be in any cause area, as long as a solution could plausibly be cost-effective.
Organizations could send in problem cases, or participants could identify their own. In fact, this thread might already give a nice list of possible problems/solutions to work on!
The event can be made more complex by adding in rounds, which filter the good solutions from mediocre and bad solutions. In further rounds, promising teams/individuals could be matched with a coach. The best few ideas get funding to take the next step in solving the problem (e.g. creating a minimum viable product).
After competing in multiple hackathons, I’ve found that they rarely produce useful work. It’s actually quite a bit of work to extract and formalize problems (from organizations). I feel like around EA, I’m not sure how many problems there are suitable to hackathons.
That said, they can be good for networking / experimenting with working with different groups. I’m happy I went through the hackathons I did, but more for skill building than direct output.
I think overall I’d expect them to be a decent use of a weekend, but would expect the output to be similar to that of other hackathons (i.e. not that much, so just expect that). ~2 days isn’t that much, both in costs and expected benefits.
I’m quite surprised to see this is the least upvoted of my ideas, as I thought it is a nice meta-suggestion and addresses a big constraint: capacity and coordination to get projects off the ground. Looking at the other suggestions, one think that jumps out is that they are very concrete and have a narrow scope—this makes it easier to see the value and easier to evaluate success, while this project is wider and has a lot left to fill in.
Could anyone comment why they are not upvoting this idea?
I didn’t see the comment previously (until I saw these comments asking about why it hadn’t been upvoted just now). I would speculate that one reason might be that the term ‘Hackathon’ is often associated just with programming or similar activities (which would be much less interesting than a general EA collective problem-solving event) and so people might have skimmed over it without reading the details.
Huh. It’s received 9 upvotes since my comment. Goes to show that upvotes reward early comments/answers earlier and answers to this questions should not be viewed as a poll!
I didn’t see this comment earlier. Having read it, this seems like one of the best ideas here and certainly worth trying. I would also be curious to see if there are strong arguments against this idea.
EA Hackathon
A multiple-day event in which people (mostly EA’s) work to solve a set of problems. These problems can be in any cause area, as long as a solution could plausibly be cost-effective.
Organizations could send in problem cases, or participants could identify their own. In fact, this thread might already give a nice list of possible problems/solutions to work on!
The event can be made more complex by adding in rounds, which filter the good solutions from mediocre and bad solutions. In further rounds, promising teams/individuals could be matched with a coach. The best few ideas get funding to take the next step in solving the problem (e.g. creating a minimum viable product).
After competing in multiple hackathons, I’ve found that they rarely produce useful work. It’s actually quite a bit of work to extract and formalize problems (from organizations). I feel like around EA, I’m not sure how many problems there are suitable to hackathons.
That said, they can be good for networking / experimenting with working with different groups. I’m happy I went through the hackathons I did, but more for skill building than direct output.
I think overall I’d expect them to be a decent use of a weekend, but would expect the output to be similar to that of other hackathons (i.e. not that much, so just expect that). ~2 days isn’t that much, both in costs and expected benefits.
I’m quite surprised to see this is the least upvoted of my ideas, as I thought it is a nice meta-suggestion and addresses a big constraint: capacity and coordination to get projects off the ground. Looking at the other suggestions, one think that jumps out is that they are very concrete and have a narrow scope—this makes it easier to see the value and easier to evaluate success, while this project is wider and has a lot left to fill in.
Could anyone comment why they are not upvoting this idea?
I didn’t see the comment previously (until I saw these comments asking about why it hadn’t been upvoted just now). I would speculate that one reason might be that the term ‘Hackathon’ is often associated just with programming or similar activities (which would be much less interesting than a general EA collective problem-solving event) and so people might have skimmed over it without reading the details.
Huh. It’s received 9 upvotes since my comment. Goes to show that upvotes reward early comments/answers earlier and answers to this questions should not be viewed as a poll!
Definitely agreed here. It’s pretty frustrating, but there’s definitely a bias towards early things.
I didn’t see this comment earlier. Having read it, this seems like one of the best ideas here and certainly worth trying. I would also be curious to see if there are strong arguments against this idea.