Hackathons are an opportunity for groups of people to combine their skills and ideas to solve problems together.

Participants need to be open-minded, collaborative, and passionate about the issue at hand to use the tools at their disposal and find a great solution to a big issue. As an organiser, you’ll need to make sure that the event runs smoothly and that everyone involved has all the information they need to succeed!

There are many different types of hackathons, where people of varying degrees of tech know-how and experience can participate! These could include “Hack Days”, like the ones we have at Marvel, where new ideas that have the potential to improve our platform are birthed over the course of a day, or others that can go over the span of a few days. Some can be run in real life, while others are online. There can be hackathons where people work as individuals, or within teams. Ideas can even be displayed as prototypes or theories, while in other cases as tangible, working, MVPs.

By the end of a hackathon, everyone involved has a greater understanding of the problem they are trying to address and has worked on a solution for it. Sometimes work done in hackathons has the potential to improve the quality of lives, or even save them!

So, why would you run one?

Well, there are many reasons why you would want to run a hackathon.