Getting Help, Mentors, and Facilitators

Getting Help

For any questions not covered by this handbook, mentors and facilitators are your first point of call. If you are competing at a physical location, flag down one of the friendly facilitators. If you are a digital competitor, jump onto Slack and get in contact with your digital facilitator. Don’t be shy about saying hello or @ing people to ask for help. It’s a supportive environment and everyone is here to learn and help each other. If facilitators aren’t available or you have a specific question, post it into a Slack channel and there’ll be someone to assist.

Mentors

Mentors can help in a variety of ways. Some can help you with a specific challenge or dataset, others for a specific technology or tool, and some are mentoring in a general capacity. You can reach out for a mentor through your facilitator or by heading to Slack. You can also browse through Mentor profiles in the Profiles section of Hackerspace.

Facilitators

These are the friendly GovHack faces who will answer any question – no matter how trivial or repetitive this may seem. They are your biggest supporters and want you to succeed. For competitors at a physical location, these are your event hosts – you’ll see them floating around the space. For digital competitors, you will be allocated a digital facilitator. Each team will receive one digital facilitator who will guide you through from start to end. To find a full list of facilitators, you can browse the Profiles section of Hackerspace.