Organizing Committee

A hack week's organizing committee includes anyone responsible for some level of decision making, planning and implementation of the hack week. Examples include tutorial developers, teachers, logistics coordinators and overall event leaders. There are many different ways to separate out the various roles and responsibilities of each committee member. Here we outline various organizational structures we have explored, and describe the sequence of steps needed to develop and maintain a healthy organizing committee.

Key Principles

Our overall recommendations for formulating an effective and functioning organizing committee are to:

• strive for a distribute leadership model: by empowering people across the organizing committee to make decisions, the committee can be more adaptive to change and there will be fewer points of failure if an individual is unable to participate
• clearly define everyone's roles and responsibilities: being as explicit as possible about this will help reduce friction between committee members and ensure that everything gets accomplished
• practice what you preach: meetings and activities conducted by the committee are great opportunities to put into practice the codes of conduct and norms of behavior that we foster during the hack weeks.
• acknowledge effort: have discussions early in the process to recognize that running these events take a lot of everyone's time and energy. Find meaningful for ways to offer gratitude and recognition to each individual who contributes.