birmingHack

birmingHack is the annual hackathon that CSS runs, started in 2025. It is typically run toward early / mid March, though when planning you will need to check with SoCS staff to see when the open days / Offer Holder Visit Days (OHVD) are, as you won't be able to run the event on a weekend if it clashes with one of these days.

Past schedules can be found in the google drive, refer to these for how the day runs.

For birmingHack you need to plan a lot of things to ensure the event runs smoothly. These things are:

• Food
• Tracks + Prizes
• Sponsors
• Theme
• Hackathons UK
• Who on committee is going to be there
• Security
• Room Bookings
• Tickets
• Website
• Standby Queue

Its a lot of work so make sure you get on top of it as soon as you can

For food you need to feed people 2 lunches, dinner and breakfast.

For dinner it will most likely be pizza, which you will need to add a form onto the tickets to know what pizzas to order. You should pre-order most of these beforehand through papa johns because you can get a small discount from them and also they will get very annoyed at you if you order them on the day. Figure out how many you need using the pizza tracker with 4 slices per person buying XXL pizzas, but don't preorder for everyone as a few people wont show up (usually around 70% show up)

For lunch we have done sandwich platters in the past. The easiest (and best) is from Sainsbury's, but to do this you need to order them at least 4 days in advance. Ensure you get vegan and gluten free food for people that need it as well. Worst case you can get sandwiches from CostCo but they aren't as good.

For breakfast just get random breakfast things like croissants and pain au chocolats and fruit and stuff. What you get depends on how much money you have.

If ramadan is occuring during birmingHack make sure you account for this, save food for them for iftar and ensure they have breakfast early. Also unrelated to food but try to get them a room for prayer as we had a small issue once of them praying on the staircase which is a fire hazard.

We have personally done 3 tracks in the past: Best Hack, Most Fun Hack and Best Newcomer. You will need to provide prizes for these, with Best Hack having the most expensive prize, and the other tracks the prize will depend on how much money you have from sponsors.

Mini-events are always fun little things that happen throughout the hackathon. Previously we have done: Chess Tournament, Paper Airplane contest, Midnight movie screening and a git workshop. Decide on a couple to run throughout but make sure you don't do too many. I would highly recommend a git workshop though. You can also have some small prizes for these, even if its something random from the cupboard

Hackathons UK also runs a cup stacking competition and they will provide a prize for this. We have red cups in the cupboard somewhere for this but they may also supply their own cups, ask them how they are running it.

We have previously done collabs with AFNOM, AlgoSoc and GDS in previous birmingHacks in order to have extra tracks for participants to enter, adding more things for people to do. Talk to societies and ensure they are happy to run them and if they will be providing prizes or not.

Hackathons UK also do a track at birmingHack and will give out a prize. They are also very helpful with grading and figuring out who won as well as other things that will be mentioned in their own section.

If you are going to do anything early for this event, getting sponsors is the main thing you should be doing. You need to ensure that contracts are signed at least 3 weeks before the event at the absolute latest (especially if they want to have someone at the event), but the earlier the better.

Talk to your current sponsors and look at companies that have sponsored other hackathons around the country at first as they are most likely to be looking at sponsoring a hackathon. Please don't go asking random American companies as they aren't gonna do it and they will think you are in Alabama.

You can be creative with this, but it needs to be decided before the event. You can announce the theme beforehand, or you can announce it at the opening ceremony. Completely up to you what you decide to do. Previously we have done 'Building Foundations' and 'Project Lazarus'. I'd recommend having something broad to let people use their imaginations but completely up to you with that.

Hackathons UK is one of the most useful companies we have worked with. They are a non-profit who work with university societies to run Hackathons and have been so helpful for us in the past. Apart from general advice they have a spreadsheet for grading hacks and choosing prizes which turns a 3 hours job into an hour and a half one.

The only reason we have had security is because Mo has required us to have some when the building is not op[en on the weekend (5pm-9am). In past we have got security from the guild + Matty. Ask Matty about this if Mo requires you to have security.

While talking to Mo about booking the building you also need to ask about having areas for hacking (the labs), a quiet area (either a room in the building or sloman), potentially a prayer room depending on when you are running it and you also need a Ceremony room for the opening and closing ceremony. The lab will not be big enough. Aston Webb is a possibility but is a pain since it isn't meant to be open on the weekend, I would recommend trying to find somewhere else. Good luck with that.

For tickets, we have used ti.to to organise it and hold all the data, especially for registration and tracking people entering/leaving the building. Look at previous years tickets on their website in order to see how to organise the tickets. The login is on the vaultwarden.

The most important things on the website is to update the main page with the date, tickets link and schedule. Most of it is automated if you just add the data into a file called `/_date/<year>.yaml`. Check previous years yamls for how this is laid out. There might be some documentation on the github for how to do this properly but I wouldn't count on it. If you need any help ask in #handover on discord.

Every year we make a new discord server for each iteration of birmingHack. You can basically just copy the template from each previous year and modify it accordingly. There is a bot that automatically grants people access based on the discord name they put on their ti.to ticket so you don't need to manually grant access. People will moan that it isn't working, they have just spelt their name wrong on the ticket.

This server is also used for all the announcements before and during birmingHack to let people know when things are happening, especially food and mini-events.

We haven't done this in the past but it's a great idea. Just make sure you publicise it if you do manage to get the school to approve it since there will be a lot of people that don't end up attending.