Welcome to Hackathon Hackers! This group is of, by, and for the amazing, still growing, community of hackers hackathons have built. We're glad you're here.
If you want to recruit us, only post in HH Job Listings. If you post job listings anywhere else on HH, we will ban you forever.
Hackathon Hackers (HH) is a community. Whenever you post or reply, there are other people sitting behind the screen reading what you say. These other people have thoughts, ideas, dreams, aspirations, troubles, advice, perspectives, feelings, and experiences, just like you. You'll probably end up meeting a lot of them if you go to hackathons. Everyone in this group is a potential new friend—treat them that way.
This document aims to make HH a place for everyone to feel welcome. The rules, guidelines, and code of conduct that follow apply to all HH subgroups, although subgroups may also extend these to better serve their own community.
Hackers are diverse and complex, with many different interests and passions. These rules are in place so that everyone can feel comfortable participating in HH. If you think they need editing or don't cover something important, please send a pull request to start the discussion.
Our guiding principle can be summarized in one 90's-era sentence: "Be excellent to each other."
These are the rules/the things this space is not for. We tried to keep them short, with more indepth explanations in the appendix. Breaking any of these will result in your prompt removal from HH.
- No harassment, including personal attacks.
- No spam. If Gmail wouldn't put it in my inbox, it shouldn't be in HH. This includes doing attention-catching things like writing in all caps, using linkbait headlines, or otherwise editing the post or preview to pop out at the cost of other posts. Posts not relating to hackathons or tech will also be considered spam.
- No shitposting, bad programmer jokes, or memes. Consider posting in a HH Sensible Chuckle.
- No recruiting for your startup, company, job, or organization. Consider posting in HH Job Listings instead.
- No posting requests or giveaways for free stuff/invites. Those belong in HH Free Stuff.
- No illegal/pirated content, requests for it, or information regarding the distribution of it.
- No telling people they or their post is not welcome in Hackathon Hackers. If you think a post does not belong in HH, report the post or message an admin. If you make other people feel unwelcome in HH, we will remove you from the group.
Hackathon Hackers is the all-inclusive hackathons community.
We encourage everyone to participate and are committed to building a community for all. Although we will fail at times, we seek to treat everyone both as fairly and equally as possible. Whenever a participant has made a mistake, we expect them to take responsibility for it.
Although this list cannot be exhaustive, we explicitly honor diversity in age, gender, gender identity or expression, culture, ethnicity, language, national origin, political beliefs, profession, race, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and technical ability. We will not tolerate discrimination based on any of the protected characteristics above, including participants with disabilities. There is no one true hacker.
Our community prioritizes marginalized people's safe existence in the community. We will not tolerate posts encouraging:
- Insensitivity toward boundary statements, such as "leave me alone," "go away," or "I'm not discussing this with you"
- Racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behaviors or assumptions (although these discussions may be moved to HH Constructive Debates if they better fit its guidelines)
However, if you have a post that falls in the above categories yet you feel still belongs in HH, you can message a moderator to discuss it. We've had posts like these in the past that turned into constructive discussions with a bit of reframing. Talking about hard problems is, itself, hard.
To encourage a more serious discussion on your post, you may preface it with a [serious] tag. Posts with the serious tag as well as their comments
- Must be on topic
- Must NOT give intentionally misleading advice
- Must NOT be images/memes unless relevant or asked for in the original post
- Must NOT be single words or phrases without explanation.
If you have an issue with a member or moderator please take it up with the moderators privately via Facebook message to avoid people ganging up or taking sides in an argument in which they are not directly involved. It’s best to contact the moderators on Facebook via private group message so we can discuss the issue with you. We promise that everything will be confidential and we won’t get mad at you if you have a complaint.
We also have a confidential form if you would rather your incident not be tied to your identity.
Hackathon Hackers is a space where people learn together.
Members are aged from middle school to retirement, span across gender identities and races, and hail from six of the seven continents. They’re united by the common love of creating amazing things with technology, usually over the course of a weekend at some college's hackathon. If this sounds like you, come join us!
Hackathon Hackers is composed of a loosely-connected ecosystem of Facebook Groups. The main group of Hackathon Hackers is the largest and most active. It's a catch-all for discussions about anything hackers care about. Think of it more as 'HH General' or #general on Slack.
There are over 50 topic-based subgroups of Hackathon Hackers. Each is managed by an independent team of volunteer moderators and must abide by this code of conduct. You can recognize them by the HH prefix in the group's name. Can't find the subgroup you're looking for or don't like what you find? Start your own subgroup today!
What should I do if I see someone violating the Code of Conduct?
Report the post. You can report a thread by clicking on the arrow in its top right hand corner. Then, a mod will look into it and take action. If the problem isn't specific to a thread, reach out to one of the HH moderators directly.
Why is this moderator ignoring me?
Moderators are volunteers with busy lives outside of HH. They will usually reply to you very promptly or connect you with someone who can, but if a moderator is taking longer to get back to you than you would like, please be patient.
What if I disagree with the moderator who reached out to me?
Feel free to reach out to other moderators, but all mods use the same CoC so I would not expect different results.
Can I contribute and improve this code of conduct?
Contributions are welcome on how to improve this code of conduct! Send us a pull request with your suggestions.
Doesn't this impact the right to free speech?
The main group of Hackathon Hackers is moderated by a team of volunteers, listed below. If you ever have a question, comment, or concern about another user, a subgroup, or HH itself, please don't hesitate to reach out to one of them via Facebook Messenger. All questions and concerns will be kept completely confidential. You can also submit anonymous feedback.
- Cassidy Williams
- Jon Gottfried
- Megan Ruthven
- JB Rubinovitz
- Zahra Taiba
- Joe Nash
- Timotius Sitorus
- Will Grayson
- Dave Fontenot
- Tristan Wiley
- Tae Hong Min
- Dan Zhang
- Sharon Lin
- Ananay Arora
Each HH subgroup is run by an independent team of moderators. If your question concerns an HH subgroup, please reach out to one of the subgroup's moderators first.
This Code of Conduct is released under CC-BY-4.0. It is heavily inspired by the Open Code of Conduct, which itself is licensed under CC-BY-4.0. A huge shout-out to @folz for compiling most of this document in his HH etiquette post, upon which this code of conduct is based. Many of the guidelines are taken from Nerdfighters of the Greater DC Area, with others borrowed from Hacker News, and Hackers@Berkeley. We're standing on the shoulders of giants.
Harassment includes, but is not limited to:
- Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, race, age, regional discrimination, political or religious affiliation
- Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment
- Deliberate misgendering. This includes deadnaming or persistently using a pronoun that does not correctly reflect a person’s gender identity. You must address people by the name they give you when not addressing them by their username or handle
- Inappropriate physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like "hug" or "backrub") without consent or after a request to stop
- Threats of violence, both physical and psychological
- Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm
- Deliberate intimidation
- Stalking or following
- Harassing photography or recording, including accessing private online activity for harassment purposes
- Sustained disruption of discussion
- Unwelcome sexual attention, including sexual images or behaviour
- Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
- Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease
- Deliberate "outing" of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect others from intentional abuse
- Publication of private communication without second party consent
Coming soon...
Anyone can start an HH subgroup. To begin, create a Facebook group whose name begins with HH, add a description/cover photo, and invite your friends. Once you've satisfied one of the prerequisites below, message a moderator requesting to be added. If your subgroup is made official, its name and short URL will be added to the main group's sidebar.
Any topic for a subgroup is acceptable as long as it provides value to the HH community. Many subgroups overlap with each other, so do not be afraid to submit applications for groups which might appear to be redundant.
- 1 week old, 5 posts, and 250 members
- 3 weeks old, 10 posts, and 100 members
- Choose a short, descriptive name and a good cover photo.
- Invite your friends who are interested in the subgroup's topic. Ask them to post or comment in the group.
- Seed the subgroup with quality content so others know what to post.
- Make sure there is a diversity of posters early on. Subgroups are communities, not one-person-shows.
- Don't be afraid to fail or have your subgroup's topic overlap with other subgroups.
There are certain commands moderators can enter as comments to manage threads. Presently these include:
/close,/threador/lock— This is our way of locking threads. From there on out, only moderators can post./slow— Only one post per minute per user on the thread is allowed./ama $AMAeror/only $AMAer— Our way of hosting Ask Me Anything's. Only the person doing the AMA will be able post on that thread. A separate thread will exist for questions, keeping the AMA answers tidy.
These commands are implemented through Hackbot, an extensible Facebook Group automoderator. We are looking to expand on these in the future. Please contribute.
Here’s to the hackers. The tinkerers. The makers. The ones who create things quickly. While some may see them as sleep-deprived loons, we see dedication. Because the students who are crazy enough to think they can make something awesome in just 36 hours, are the ones who do.