Committee Formation

Usually a hack week is spearheaded by one or several individuals who have the motivation to host a hack week for a specific community. Once topic of a hackweek is formulated, the process of gathering together other committee memebers should begin, ideally no later than 12 months prior to the event.

Below we list the typical roles across an organizing committee. We note that for some events, certain roles might not be considered an integral part of the formal organizing committee, such as tutorial leads. There are advantages and disadvantages to including everyone at the decision making level, and these should be considered by the lead organizers early in the process.

Some advantages include an increased sense of ownership that results in organizers putting forth their best effort in designing and delivering content, and a broadening of the collective wisdom of the organizing committee around important decisions due to the presence of a diversity of perspectives. Early career faculty and researchers also often report that being recognized at the organizational level helps their resumes when it comes to applying for jobs.

Disadvantages include the fact that as the committee size increases, the process of making decisions can become more challenging. It can also become difficult to include everyone in important decision making meetings when the organizing committee spans multiple time zones.

Tutorial Leads

Generally the largest group of organizers are focused around development and delivery of data science tutorials. Responsibilities include:

• polling their respective communities to determine what are the community needs around data science education
• talking to open source software developers to connect with the most up-to-date tools and libraries available
• building a set of learning objectives, designing and creating a tutorial
• review the content of a tutorial and integrate it with themes of other tutorials offered in the event
• work with cloud computing organizers to ensure all the tools are in place for participants to run interactive tutorials
• practice the delivery of tutorials in advance of the event

Additional guidelines on the roles and responsibilities for tutorial leads can be found on the Geo Hack Week wiki page for tutorial leads.

logistics coordinator

The logistics coordinator plays an important role in event planning and implementation. A partial list of their responsibilities has been compiled on the Geo Hack Week administrative planning repository as a set of GitHub issues. (ask Jane for one of her checklists)

Project/Hack coordinator

A project/hack coordinator helps to guide the formation and smooth functioning of projects and hacking during the event. Responsibilities include:

• guiding a team in defining project goals that can be reasonably accomplished during the week
• setting benchmarks for team activities and checking-in regularly with team members on progress
• helping to ensure that everyone gets a chance to participate in group work in some way
• enabling and encourage participants to solve problems in a way that builds confidence
• supporting the project scientist in establishing reproducible workflows
• mentoring individual team members requesting additional support
• working with the team to navigate technical or team dynamic challenges

Cloud computing resource organizers

For many events we use centralized cloud computing resources, for example JupyterHub deployed on a commercial cloud platform. This requires someone who can deploy these resources and be available to assist with any troubleshooting during the event.

overall coordination

There may be one or several people considered overall leaders of the event. These are often the people who initiated the idea of the hack week in the first place. Within a more traditional organizational structure, there may be one person responsible for most of the decision making and ensuring everthing gets done, however this can place a significant burden on a single person. In a more distributed leadership model, multiple people have autonomous decision making power informed and supported by cross-team communications.

Responsibilities of overall coordinators include:

• providing the impetus and energy for initiating and moving the event forward
• calling meetings, establishing effective channels of communication and linking up the right people
• identifying duplication of effort and increasing team efficiencies
• acting as the main point of contact for outreach and communcations outside of the group
• writing proposals and seeking funding
• leading efforts to recruit members of the organizing committee
• keeping an eye on the big picture to be sure everyone is on schedule
• leading challenging discussions and mediating conflicts

Recruiting an organizing committee

Depending on the size of the group who initiate the idea of a hack week, it may or may not be necessary to put time into recruiting others to assist as members of the organizing committee. In the case of an institution such as a university department starting a hack week, there may be enough local administrative support and tutorial leads without needing to find additional people. In other cases, for example our recent ICESat-2 hack week aimed at building software tools for a new NASA mission, we wanted to have participation from a broad community, especially members of the satellite's science team who had already begun to build software tools. In this case a broader range of recruitment efforts were necessary. For hack weeks that recur over multiple years, one might also recruit enthusiastic participants as organizers for subsequent events, as has been common for Astro Hack Week

Because the organizing committee has a responsibility to model the principles and norms of behavior we aim to promote at a hack week, it is important to find people whose values align with this mission. Similarly, we want the organizing committee to be as diverse as possible to maximize the number of different perspectives in the room, and to offer role models to an equally diverse range of hack week participants.

Here are some of general principles for recruiting a diverse and engaged organizing committee:

• Designate one person or a small committee to be responsible for recruitment. Among this group, build a list of potential recruitees who would be considered good organizers and who would benefit from being on the commitee in some way. Try to think not only of the most visible community leaders within your network, but also individuals from diverse communities who may offer different perspectives. This list may also contain names of people who have approached the hack week organizers with an intention to participate.
• For recruitees who are completely new to the group and who have not experienced a hack week, initiate a 30 minute meeting with the lead coordinator(s). Begin the meeting with a review of the hack week mission and ask the recruitee to offer some reflections on how their participation would serve to support that mission. This meeting is also an opportunity to share ideas on potential ways the recruitee can get involved.
• An e-mail invitation to both new and continuing potential committee members is an effective way to establish an organizational structure early in the process. The purpose of the message is to:
  • thank the pontential committee member for considering this activity
  • provide links to logistics information (event location, timing, travel arrangements)
  • provide a reminder of the roles, responsibilities and potential time commitment for this activity
  • offer to have this person's information included on the hack week website
• For some hack weeks we have used the participant application form as an efficient way to initially assemble an organizing committee. Committee members will be asked to fill out this form anyhow, for the sake of assessing our overall team diversity. In this process we also ask them to provide details on the open-ended questions about how they would like to be involved on an administrative level.

Recognizing contributions from committee memebers

Hack week organizing committees often include a mix of people who are both funded to participate in the hack week activities, and who are contributing their time voluntarily. In most cases, hack weeks would not happen without the generosity of many people who believe in the community building and educational mission of these events. In order to sustain the continued offering of hack weeks, it is important to find ways to acknowledge and if possible, reimburse people for their time and effort.

Here are some ideas for recognizing people's contributions to hack weeks:

• ask how individuals would like to be recognized: some people want to be paid (e.g. more senior faculty who are not allowed to charge an existing grant for this type of work), others (e.g. postdocs) would rather have some form of formal recognition they can point to for their resume.
• provide payment: if the event is supported by grant funding, and if sufficient funds are available, then local organizers can often charge directly to a specific award for their time. For organizers recruited from outside an institution it may be possible offer an honorarium or gift as a way to recognize contributions.
• offer formal recognition: posting a photo, short biography and links to each organizer's website, GitHub page and other social media links can provide useful exposure to early career researchers.
• celebrate successes: make an effort to have a team activity such as a lunch or dinner after the event to celebrate everyone's contributions. This might be combined with an overall event debrief.
• have ways to express gratitude during the event: verbally recognizing organizer's contributions helps participants learn more about who contributed to the event. We have also experimented with things like a "gratitude board" where participants can anonomously post thank-you notes to anyone at the event.
• provide institutional affiliation: some institutions offer formal affiliation with their organization for people who contribute in substantial ways to an event.
• be efficient: thoughful administration practices implicitly recognize the importance of people's time and contributions. Small things, such as careful planning of meetings that have agendas and that regularly check-in with attendees regarding their time availability, can go a long way toward respecting the contributions of volunteers.