Our newest team member, Theo, presented us with Hack Club Bank, a service he had found online, which would allow our high school hackathon to raise money in a much less sketchy way than before. Even though we were minors, we could now send invoices and have a non-profit status.
Within days, Theo jumped into Hack Club’s Slack community. Within weeks, he befriended other high schoolers from the Midwest and California, and encourged me to do the same.
Bank, it turned out, was just one thing offered by Hack Club, a worldwide network of student-led coding clubs with a bustling online community. I told him, “Nah, it’s too much work. I’d have to insert myself into conversations and spend a ton of time on the Slack.”
Later that fall, Theo told me about Meginar, a hackathon fundraising webinar by Megan, a Hack Club leader from Ohio who had raised tens of thousands of dollars, even getting McDonald’s Corporation as a sponsor.
Our hackathon’s operating budget was struggling in the triple digits, so I finished my homework early and got comfortable in front of my computer for a lengthy night.
I was blown away. She mentioned how she organically made incremental improvements to her email templates just by virtue of having to interact with it forty, fifty times a day. Most of all, though, I thought: this is what it looks like to be good at and passionate about what you do.
Her pieces of advice were things I might have guessed from intuition, but she was making her points with the confidence of having arrived at them through tons of trial and error. It was like the hackathon advice that I knew, but multiplied ten times, both in terms of input and output, effort and success.
I stuck around the Slack after the webinar. I mentioned that I was trying to run a TEDx event, and chatted with Matthew, from Indiana, who was trying to do the same at his school. A few months later, Matthew actually came to my hackathon and helped out.
During this time I heard a few people on staff make remarks about the community—they weren’t satisfied with it either and wanted to improve it. They took this community very seriously because they knew how important it was to the students in it. From revitalizing channels, such as #ship, for students to post cool projects that they’ve made, to creating a community wide call (#all-hands) for Hack Club to share their new initiatives and get direct feedback. Throughout this process, I shared a bit about my experiences. It was then that I realized that this community was actively built and maintained. people were actively building this community. There’s the question of what constitutes a good community. And also the fact that good communities don’t just happen—they’re not inevitable.
A few weeks ago, I was in the car with Lachlan, a former club leader from Pennsylvania, now attending NYU, and two Hack Club staff members—Chris, who's more permanently based in Connecticut, and Max, who's impermanently based in Connecticut.
We had just finished volunteering at TeenHacksLI, a high school hackathon on Long Island. As we drove to a train station in the Bronx, we had tired musings about how to build the community. It's interesting to think about how to build an online community full of impressionable students.
They want to build a nice place to be and grow up on the Internet. It often involves educating people to cultural sensitivity and social issues. How do you foster emotional maturation and cultural competence at scale?
Additionally, it is a community of young people and has already seen several generations of people enter and leave. This adds another dimension to the already complex issue. How do you establish and maintain a culture with people flowing in and out?