Leading a hackathon Team

Designing your project

hackseq is perfect for catalyzing a creative idea into reality.

A good hackathon project has well-defined and specific objectives. Over 3-days, a team of ~4-8 can successfully implement a proof of concept or prototype software. Follow-up work will refine that seed into a production quality resource.

A great hackathon project is high-risk and requires interdisciplinary expertise. Each team member is a teacher and student, contributing their knowledge the the collective and learning in the process.

Your main job is to identify key project skill requisites, acquire the datasets and background resources for your team to hit the ground running.

(Don’t worry we can help!)

Collaborate with fellow bio-hackers

Hackathons attract young, passionate, and bright participants. Consider what combination of skills and what level of proficiency are necessary for your project. Participants range from dedicated undergraduates to veteran research associates and grizzly professors.

## Example Teams:

Contribute to open science!

You have complete creative control, we only ask that the code developed at hackseq is open source and open science.

At the end of the hackathon, your team will be expected to deliver: A project abstract, a README.md file, and a 5 minute presentation on what your team has accomplished.

When you’re ready to publish your hackathon project, let us know. hackseq offers supportive grants to offset the cost of open-access publication. Contact us at hackseq@gmail.com.

Protips:

• Hackathons thrive on prototyping novel ideas that require a diverse set of skills/expertise. It’s unlikely it will yield a finished product, but you’ll know if the idea is worth pursing (and have a team ready to take it forward).

• You’re planting the seed, but your team is nurturing the plant. Sharing ownership of a collaborative project often brings out the best qualities in a team. Use that expertise, it may not be how you originally envisioned a solution, but it may be more efficient. (See also: The Cathedral and the Bazaar).

• A hackathon won’t substitute hiring a bioinformatician. If you have some data which requires a standard analysis (i.e. RNA-seq differential expression between GENE[WT] and GENE[KO]), consider framing it as a “Intro to” or “Learn to” project where you and the team work through and learn to do the analysis together.

We are here to help!

Questions? Want to bounce an idea off someone?

Email us at hackseq@gmail.com.

Select Past Projects:

• [XYalign]* : Inferring sex chromosome and autosomal ploidy in NGS data *published

• [bioSyntax]* : Syntax highlighting for computational biology *published

• [Genomic Data Analysis in R]* : Tutorials for bioinformatics in R *published

• [BiocSwirl()] : Interactive bioinformatics workflow tutorials

• [Single Cell Virtual Reality] : Explore single-cell RNA-seq data in VR

• [ChromeQC] : Summarise sequencing library quality of 10X Genomics Chromium linked reads

• [Snacc] : Compress and compare pathogen genomes without sequence alignment

Explore more projects from [hackseq16], [hackseq17], [hackseq18], and [hackseq19].