Brainhack Donostia 2022 was a huge success!
But we're not done yet @BHDonostia@brainhackorg.
🧵 Here's my personal opinion on what we did well, and what we need to improve:
First, congratulations to the organizing committee for hosting the best Brainhack Donostia yet.
For the first time, it felt like we had a proper, real Brainhack where we mostly focused on projects and everyone collaborated.
HUGE thanks to chairs @h_zjakic and @lmanso_ for leading & coordinating the committee.
Also, kudos to the "help desk" & "keep people happy" teams for their amazing work this year.
And last but not least, a big shoutout to the "talks" team for the incredible lineup of speakers!
In general, all the teams within the organization worked pretty well.
For next year, I would try to make sure of two things:
• Reduce the number of dropouts
• Have a predefined number of people needed in each group
Another thing we need to improve is our website: it is based on an unsupported template.
I've been making edits as we went to make it work, but I couldn't get it done this year.
Next year the website should use a new template.
I think we should collaborate with @biook_org next year to have a project for people who want to learn about neuroscience or would like to study neuroscience in the future.
It could be a very simple project in which people from outside the neuroscience field would learn what data looks like (e.g., EEG), how to program a few lines of code with Python, and how to visualize what they've done.
TL;DR: to create a new generation of brainhackers.
We had an idea a while back for a Brainhack Summer School, where we would teach neuroscience and programming to teenagers and undergraduates.
This new idea fits perfectly with that!
We were late getting local media coverage for our event this year.
I think @bcbl_ could help us get access to radio, papers, and TV next time if we start advertising earlier.
It would put us on the map and help us get exposure for better grants.
We need to be more active on Twitter all year round - not just a couple months before the event.
It's a lot of work to come up with tweet ideas, but if we want new attendees every year, people should see us consistently through different media.
One option is to start a newsletter that we send out 3 or 4 times a year to everyone that has ever participated in our Brainhack.
We could use MailChimp for easy editing and mailing, and people who want to unsubscribe can also do that.
PS: If you wonder what tool I use to write my tweets and be consistent, check typefully.com/?via=eneko