Georgia Tech’s 2018 Greek Week was April 2 - 9! This year, 27 fraternities and 10 sororities competed in over 30 events. We had field day classics like Egg Toss and Dizzy Bat, sport tournaments like Flag Football and Dodgeball, and other mainstays like Tug and Greek Sing. We had a team of 15 people working hard to make it the best Greek Week ever. I was our Technology Chair this year, and I got the chance to work on some pretty cool stuff! I worked with our new Tech Committee to build out mobile-friendly web projects like a new Calendar website, and I led the charge on organizing our first-ever Greek Week hackathon!
First Greek Week Hackathon
I’m a big fan of hackathons (if you couldn’t tell). Greek Week has lots of sporting events that test physical prowess, but we also have plenty of other events that cover all sorts of different interests and skills. We assess our event line-up every year to see if we want to make any cuts or additions, so this year I lobbied for us to host a hackathon. We got a room booked, ordered some food, invited judges, and were ready to go!
The hackathon itself was 19 hours long, and was worth a sizable number of points towards the overall Greek Week standings. I was pretty impressed with the turnout — 12 teams competed (4 sororities and 8 fraternities)! There were some pretty cool projects, too. The winning fraternity (Theta Chi) built a platform for coordinating the pickup and donation of leftover food from Greek houses. The winning sorority (Alpha Phi) made a website that lets Greek organization post about their philanthropy events.
Technology Committee & New web projects
We have lots of information to publish throughout the week, including a calendar, event rules, and daily points standings. Greek Week is a fairly active and on-the-go event, so it’s desirable for our participants to have great mobile-friendly ways to view all of this important info. As recently as 2016, we just published a PDF with our schedule and rules and released a daily Google Sheets document with point tallies. That sort of stuff is passable for users on desktop, but was pretty difficult to use on mobile devices.
My biggest mission as Technology Chair (for both 2017 and 2018) was to create new mobile-friendly websites for viewing this sort of information. Last year I worked on a new standings website that had a responsive layout, and it was a huge improvement over just a spreadsheet. I had a lot more I wanted to see get done this year, but was also a lot busier, so we decided to create a new Technology Committee. I recruited three talented dudes to join my committee, and essentially worked as the team Project Manager for the semester.
With tons of help from my committee, we were able to get a lot done! We released a brand new Calendar website with a list of daily events. The calendar site was responsive for mobile devices, and also included rules imported directly from the rulebook PDF. We also got to design and build a new event page for the Standings website that showed points related to a specific event. All of these tools were super useful for our participants, and were used over 15,000 times during the week.
Our Exec Team
We had an exec team of 15 that worked very hard throughout the Spring semester to prepare for Greek Week. We had a great time, though, all in the name of making sure everyone in the Greek community has a great time, too! We recruit every fall, so keep a look out for that if you’re interested.
I’ve been a Technology Chair for the past two years (2017 and 2018), but I probably I’ll sit out next year. I’d really like to participate in Greek Week events before I graduate — I was a pledge during Greek Week 2016 so I didn’t really participate that much, and was on exec the other two years so I couldn’t actually participate in any events. I’m looking forward to finally competing in some Greek Week events next year! (especially Bailout)