Building a Hackathon Community
How do you convince over 850 students from across North America to travel to Ottawa, Canada, live within your university’s engineering building for 36 hours, and do nothing but diligently code?
TL;DR: You shouldn’t have to convince them at all.
From the start, we don't tell students to prepare for hours of coding at our hackathon; we promise them an adventure of learning and building from their own ingenuity.
We strive to create a free and safe environment where beginner to veteran hackathon goers have the opportunity to take a break from the busy rhythm of being a student to learn new skills, build something from scratch, and make lifelong friends along the way.
Whether it's an industry-changing idea or just something silly or useless (it’s a real prize category) you create with your friends. Our metric of success is that participants feel they've come away having learned something new and are inspired to explore tech outside the classroom.
Hackathon: An event, typically lasting several days, in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming.
And no, we’re not “hacking” into or breaking into anything at all.
My journey into hackathons started in high school, thanks to my older brother, who convinced me to volunteer at uOttaHack. I helped out, made some new friends, but most importantly, was fascinated by how fun hackathon were!
A year later, now a freshman at the University of Ottawa, I was excited to jump back in and take on more hackathons. But to my surprise, uOttaHack and many other local events were no longer being organized. The reasons varied—COVID-19, fewer in-person gatherings, but mainly a graduating team of organizers all made it difficult for these hackathons to continue.
Inspired by the success of past uOttaHack events, I reached out to the founding team and presented an ambitious vision: to build upon their strong foundation and scale uOttaHack by increasing student participation, organizing more community events, and expanding opportunities for students. With their support, I built a small team of dedicated and excited students passionate about hackathons, and together, we took the first step in bringing uOttaHack back to our campus!
Getting Started
Our team was full of excitement, ideas, and passion, but we quickly realized that the journey ahead wouldn't be easy. From day one, we had a growing list of tasks, each one appearing more costly than the last. Fortunately for us, we had a strong support system. A special shoutout to the founding members and advisors Paul Lee, Vivian Diec, Natesh Kukreja, Tommy Deng, and Hamza Basrai who were always eager to help, provide timely advice, and helped us lay the groundwork to succeed!
We pooled together our collective past experiences and knowledge of organizing events and got to work. First, we had to convince our university not only to let us run the event again but also to support it. Fortunately, Jacques Beauvais, the previous Dean of Engineering and his team, became strong advocate for uOttaHack. Jacques and his team believed in our vision, providing us with advice and opening the doors to many opportunities. This included connecting us with key faculty members, industry partners, and campus resources. This enabled us to focus on delivery the best hackathon!
Team Bonding
Our advisors emphasized the importance of building a strong team culture. From the very beginning, we made it a top priority to grow inter-team chemistry and create an environment that fosters fresh ideas and collaboration. We organized regular team bonding events and even traveled to New York for HackCon, a global conference for hackathon organizers, to connect and learn from others in the field! If you are a hackathon organizer I STRONGLY recommend attending!
Our Teams
Finance (Yaro): Even when our budget fluctuated, finance always kept us in the #000000 and from breaking the bank, and spoiler alert; we didn’t!
Sponsorship (Caitlin & Marouane): One of our toughest challenges was persuading anyone to collaborate with us — a group of university students attempting to organize a 'hackathon’, let alone contribute money. Caitlin was a superstar in her role in uOttaHack 5, effectively connecting students to some of the top employers in Canada and securing funding to make the event possible! The following year, despite a difficult tech economy, Marouane built upon the great foundation of the previous year and delivered some of the best sponsors and passionate supporters our events have ever had. A highlight of uOttaHack 6 was Ford, one of our Gold level sponsors, bringing a ton of vehicles for students to explore and play around with!
UX / Logistics (Catt & Saja): Our logistics team truly excelled in managing the hackathon, and this success wouldn't have been possible without the leadership of Catt and Saja, and the work of their teams. They handled everything exceptionally, from coordinating with delicious food vendors to maintaining a precise schedule, and even making Costco runs to feed our hungry hackers. Thanks to their efforts, our hacker experience was top-notch!
Marketing (Elayna & Lauren): I think "Marketing" is a poor term to describe what this team actually does; it’s really more about acting as the voice of uOttaHack to the world. Whether it’s passing accurate info to our 1000+ potential hackers or managing the brand image of our hackathon, this role is crucial for longevity, especially if you want to build a recognizable community.
Development (Eric, Alona, Lucas, and Hamed): Our technical dream team! They were instrumental in everything from creating our website to developing our internal power app, uOttaApp which handled all the event data, tracking, and our live site.
Community (Devon): Devon and the community team were instrumental in maintaining engagement and getting students excited for our main hackathon event. They organized tech panels, discussions with industry speakers, career fairs, and study sessions, maximizing resources and information that isn't typically covered in the classroom... oh, and to help us all through exam season ;)
Initially, I was the sole Director for uOttaHack, but when Yaro joined as Co-Director, I realized how much the workload was distributed between us. Having someone with equal decision-making power made it easier to bounce ideas off each other and brainstorm out loud. Without Yaro's help, we wouldn't have achieved the quality we did.
There are a ton of other folks, from volunteers to mentors, and smaller things the whole team pitched in that made uOttaHack possible! But the essence is this: surround yourself with people who are aligned with the mission and willing to go above and beyond their lane of responsibilities. What set our team apart was everyone’s eagerness to provide input and support in every aspect of the event from start to finish.
Event Photos (2023 - 2025)
Some of our favourite photos over the years :)
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Mentorship & Future Events
After 2.5 years of organizing, Yaro and I wanted to pass on our experience to the next group of student leaders. We were lucky to have a eager team of new and returning organizers. A special shoutout to the 2025 Co-Directors—Matteo Dagostino, Lauren Hong, and Saja Elkurtehi—for pushing the vision of uOttaHack forward and scaling uOttaHack 7 to be the largest iteration yet.
The new Co-Directors found a really great way to bring the team together, get everyone excited about the event, and what impressed us most was the pace they set and their ability to lead by example. The division of responsibilities was another thing that impressed us. Matteo kept finance on track, Lauren set a high standard and led design, and Saja held everything together, supporting the logistics team during key moments. Their creative sponsorship strategy by reaching to more hardware companies, alongside sponsorship lead Devon Knight, resulted in the largest budget and diverse set of challenges we’ve ever seen at uOttaHack.
The team leads also played a major role in ensuring that uOttaHack 7 was incredible — Anthony Le kept logistics in check, perfecting every detail in the schedule, Vanessa Vo brought uOttaHack to life with unique community events, Devon Knight made sure the money kept rolling in with the sponsorship team, Adam Said who built excitement for the event with marketing team, and finally Hamed Tavarkoli, who built our dream list of dev solutions, some of our favourites were a custom built judging platform, registration system, and uOttaHack’s LLM API.
And all of the eager coordinators that stepped up, filling in the gaps and making the event possible. Many of them have now taken on strong leadership roles for the 2026 event, building a strong pipeline of growth and continued success of the event.
Reflection
Our goal was to restart the hackathon culture at uOttawa and inspire students to explore their passion for tech. We exceeded our expectations with a record number of student attendees, an expanding list of sponsors, unique technical challenges, exciting prizes, and much more!
My personal measure of success for uOttaHack was simple: if even one student shared that our event helped them learn something new or inspired them to attend more hackathons, then it was a success in my book. With that in mind, I’d like to share some of the post-event.
Notice how these things are all indirectly involved with the organizers? We simply facilitated the opportunity for the community to get together, and it was really the people who volunteered their time to mentor and fellow hackers that made it such a great experience. To this day, I’m super grateful for all those recruiters and developers that decided to take a leap of faith on us. I imagine this is similar to how startups feel with their first investors.
This is such amazing validation of our vision and work!
Recap Videos
But the team is far being done!
All these things we do, the hours we spend on this project are done for you all; the student hacker community. It doesn’t matter what you study in school, what you look like, if you can afford to go, or your own skills. You are at the essence of every decision we make, and the focus of our work. Our success is due to your support. Excited to support future organizers and see uOttaHack continue to grow!
Thank you for inspiring us,
Myself and the entire uOttaHack team!
Join us for the ride at https://uottahack.ca