lsetiawan
commented
6 years ago - [ ] decide on an optimum and upper limit group size. All hack weeks held so far have had group sizes between 40-60 participants, with a recommended minimum 30 and maximum 70. Decision depends on room size and the capacity for the organizational team to facilitate interactions across participants, keeping in mind issues of maximizing diversity and maximizing engagement of all participants.
- [ ] decide on event duration. All hack weeks organized up to now have been five days. This duration was chosen to allow enough time for both learning and project work at the same time. Participants often arrived with ambitious project ideas, or with the goal of taking newly learned methods and applying them to their data sets right away. Thus many projects tended to extend over multiple days. Attendees who participated in multiple projects often used the hack week to try out several different ideas. A five-day hack week allows for ample time for these ambitious projects or experimentation, where a shorter hack week would necessarily have to be more constrained and focused. At the same time, hack weeks tend to be exhausting. Project work often extends into the evenings, and requires prolonged phases of high concentration of participants, thus we limited our hack weeks to five days in order to avoid excessive fatigue among our attendees.