I'm the hackathon guy here at MeetMe, where we are starting to plan our 9th internal hackathon since 2012 that we call HACKD. Most of these thoughts presented

I'm the hackathon guy here at MeetMe, where we are starting to plan our 9th internal hackathon since 2012 that we call HACKD. Most of these thoughts presented here I agree with. A few additional points I'd like to add: Themes can also back fire. I'd highly suggest going with no themes as well. Heck, even encourage things outside of your day to day job. You might be surprised at what people come up with. Hackathons are about exploration, and while themes can be great to help people come up with ideas, they can also hinder. We've had hackathons with themes and those without, and I can't say that the themes made any noticeable impact on the ideas presented. Prizes are dangerous. Don't make it tangible, such as money or a thing. We tried many different prizes, and the one that worked the best was a paid team outing. Limo to and from a restaurant of their choice, all paid for, and the net result was a team that had a lot of fun getting out, relaxing, and just getting to know one another better. The specific outing isn't important, but that the activity is done as a team. Indeed, the activity itself was chosen by the team. Support is also crucial. If the idea is something that can be put into production, it should be. In this case, those teams were given an additional week of time to clean up the product and make it ready to ship. Focal came out of this, and while it's a hobby of ours, it's simple and fun, and still supported (with new changes coming!). Voting is interesting. I do votes via a Google Form. Generally we have between 15-20 projects per hackathon, and some projects get 1 vote. You don't want to be that guy to get the 1 vote. It's demoralizing. We announce the top 3. You have to account for larger teams. They'll vote for themselves, and that's in some ways fine. After all, if you can convince 3 other people to help you with your idea, that should count for something. Also, look beyond just programmers. We include QA, design, project managers, and product on our teams. I've had our QA people build websites, and product people programming iOS apps, and even projects managers working to streamline processes that needed improvements. They did spend their time learning this stuff, but that's the whole point of a hackathon. To stretch yourself. We've had a blast with our hackathons, and I can't wait for HACKD 9.