What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘hackathon’? Innovation. Collaboration. Code. Now picture doing all of that virtually with over 500 participants from different time zones, more than 10 projects, spoken languages, cultures, situational challenges and internet speeds. That was my recent experience with WMAHack25.
As technical lead for this ambitious three-day Wiki mentor Africa hackathon, I had the honor (and sometimes the discomposure) of witnessing everything that goes into executing a massive event like this. Spoiler alert: it’s a mix of well-planned pandemonium, last-minute choices, and a whole lot of collaboration.
In this writeup, I’ll share what happened during the three day online event, along with everything I had to navigate, the insights I gained, and recommendations for organizers or mentors from my experiences managing such events in or out of the Wikimedia community.
Setting the Stage: Weeks Before the Event
Organizing a hackathon requires a considerable amount of pre-work. For my team and I, it started months prior to the event:
- Defining the target of the event and the participants
- Looking at various event options (online, offline, hybrid)
- Creating Zoom and Telegram groups.
- Spotting interesting projects and their repositories (e.g Gerrit, Github, etc).
- Preparing various onboarding documents (Developer pack, requirements, environment setup, etc)
- Ensuring cross regional document and event access through multiple devices.
Lesson 1: Documenting tasks through a checklist is crucial. Not recalling all arrangements in advance would have undoubtedly been devastating. For instance, we ran through facilitation demos with mentors, which was incredibly rewarding in the end.
Day 1: Let the Hack Begin (And the Glitches Too)
The very first day of the event fed me with a rush of adrenaline. My job was to make sure that mentors, organizers, and participants were able to navigate the virtual space without any problems. Funnily enough, I had to mentor projects too!
From letting participants into Zoom breakout rooms to providing real-time solutions to login challenges, I rapidly discovered that:
- Some users attempting to access Zoom through a web browser face issues that are absolutely infuriating.
- Mentors might be running late or come to the meeting unequipped – unreasonable, but still somewhat explainable.
- Multilingual rooms with no interpreters? That’s begging for distraction and complaints.
Lesson 2: Don’t forget to assign at least one individual to oversee tech support for each session. Also, make sure that there are other communication channels like Telegram that are easily accessible for quick issue resolution.
Day 2: Scaling Support While Keeping the Energy Alive
On the second day, the technical team became the glue holding many moving parts together.
My key tasks included:
- Updating the mentor list and sharing detailed project briefs
- Tagging easy tasks as “Good First Tasks” to onboard beginners
- Conducting check-ins with teams and mentors every 30 minutes
- Monitoring Zoom, Gerrit, and Telegram for any technical hiccups
Challenges? Oh, plenty. To name a few critical ones:
- Some mentors were overwhelmed by the number of groups.
- Others didn’t respond to check-ins.
- A few participants got completely lost in the system.
Lesson 3: Tag floating mentors and create a check action report to track the various teams’ health. When people don’t speak up, proactive support makes a difference.
Day 3: Demos, Deadlines, and Deliverables
The final day was all about showcasing. We created Etherpads to curate demo submissions, shared grading templates, and stayed on-call for technical emergencies.
But it wasn’t smooth sailing:
- Some mentors didn’t update task statuses and didn’t reply to the calls made in their channels early enough to explain why.
- Collaboration requests for final touch-ups were missing causing a bit of distortion in the showcase process.
- Participants needed help figuring out Phabricator task submissions.
Lesson 4: Create a “demo-day toolkit” and run a dry-run. Even a 15-minute walk-through can save hours of confusion.
Post-Hackathon: The Work Isn’t Over
Once the hackathon ended, we shifted to cleanup mode:
- Closing tasks on Project boards (Phabricator) and moving curating incomplete tasks for follow up
- Following up with mentors for task reviews and participants
- Migrating unfinished work to new boards for future tracking
- Creating documentation pages for new projects
Final Thoughts: Leading with People, Not Just Platforms
Lesson 5: Designate post-event stewards. Momentum can easily fade. Having a dedicated follow-up team ensures continued progress.
WMAHack25 was more than a hackathon — it was an opportunity to explore more, and to strengthen leadership, empathy, collaboration and improvisation.
Yes, we handled Zoom links and Phabricator boards. But we also became a bridge between overwhelmed mentors, confused participants, and platforms that occasionally failed us. We had to work all throughout the night during the most active days with highly motivated participants. And through it all, I learned that no tool is more valuable than good communication and a prepared team.
If you’re ever tasked with leading the tech side of a virtual event, remember: prepare for things to break, people to get lost, and timelines to shift. But if you’re ready, calm, and flexible, you’ll be the reason things come back together.
We have a curation of the documents which were used by the technical committee before, during and after the event. An interesting place to start is the “common issues” tab. If you’re able to tackle those, then the rest is, as one of my collaborators would say, “Follow Come” (i.e history).
You can watch the showcase session of the hackathon to have a foretaste of all the projects we worked on. Enjoy!
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