Ask HN: What about taking Hackathons online?

31 points

15 years ago

Living in a rural area I've never been to a hackathon or startup weekend. I realize those benefit massively from hackers being in one physical space with other fellow hackers, but I'm thinking about ways to take a hackathon online without losing too much momentum. Having seen Minecraft's notch stream entire coding sessions live I wonder if this could be a viable solution. I looked into it, there are good ways to stream a desktop (or parts of it) via justin.tv, even on linux systems.

Let's say we create a website that embends the desktops of all participants and their projects in a grid thus transporting some of this "woah, they're doing something, i should too" feeling. With regard to projects there are many possible ways to do it. One idea would be to make it a nonprofit hackathon where organizations could apply and teams or individual hackers could pick what they'd like (similar to random hacks of kindness), or just let startups do their own things.

But first I'd like to know if the online hackathon idea is even remotely interesting. Would you share (parts of) your desktop live for such an event? Do you think it's possible to create a momentum this way?

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