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Comment by chambo622 | Hacker News Reader

I've been to a dozen large hackathons and they essentially all operate in this manner. I've been trying to come up with another way - the expo style has many shortcomings including those you listed. It's very hard to stand out in this format especially if your demo is not conducive to 10 seconds standing up at a table with 100db ambient volume. Makes the importance of designing a hackathon-friendly hack paramount.

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The expo definitely has it's tradeoffs, but I've been to dozens of hackathons now, and before we switched to the expo, the endings were significantly lower energy: https://medium.com/how-to-throw-a-hackathon/635563ceab2f

Expo definitely favors larger teams as we only allow one person to demo from each team at a time, leaving the team members to swap out and check out all the other hacks. While the demos in front of everyone may be more fair, the expo builds community and gives people the opportunity to get immediate feedback on their pitch/product even if they dont win a prize or make it to the final round.

You should've seen the energy in the room.

PennApps, LAHacks, HackTech, HackSC...all had expos. You're right in that demos for everyone just aren't feasible. But I think you understate the challenges and downsides associated with expos.

The hackathon explosion is just getting started, I'm sure things will continue to improve as these events mature.

LAUNCH had teams assigned to one of 15 groups of judges and you pitched them and the winners from each group of judges made it forward to the next round which meant one 3-5 minute pitch only. The downside was that you didn't get to see most of what everyone else built.

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