Re:Diversity and Startups
by gailees on Friday July 25, 2014 @05:26PM
(#8087738)
This year, our theme for MHacks (http://mhacks.org) is that "Hackathons are for everone."
We've changed our advertising to focus on the first time hacker experience rather than competition, lowered the prize amounts, and have adapted our application to be as blind to experience as possible.
In my experience, smaller hackathons are actually much more exclusive because they tend to be much more homogenous due to the self-selection bias; whereas, at a larger hackathon with thousands of applications, we have the opportunity to focus our outreach to welcome a much more diverse audience.
We've changed our advertising to focus on the first time hacker experience rather than competition, lowered the prize amounts, and have adapted our application to be as blind to experience as possible.
In my experience, smaller hackathons are actually much more exclusive because they tend to be much more homogenous due to the self-selection bias; whereas, at a larger hackathon with thousands of applications, we have the opportunity to focus our outreach to welcome a much more diverse audience.