This is awesome. Thank you for putting it together. As I am in a group scheduling a Hackathon, we can put it to immediate use. I'd like to see a lot more articles of this usefulness and information density on HN.<p>I would like to complain about a very minor point though, but one that drives me bonkers. The overuse of the word "manifesto" must stop. I even wrote an article attempting to collect all the internet manifestos. It went on for a long time, and didn't come close. <a href="http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog/after-the-agile-manifesto-stop-writing-any-more-please/" rel="nofollow">http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog/after-the-agile-manifesto-s...</a> Now there is a new entry.<p>A manifesto is a political document calling for change. This is much more of a to-do list. Or a how-to article. Or a event helper. Anything but a manifesto! :)<p>While we're on content nits, you might want to add anchors to the headings for deep-linking. Also an alternate chronological view would be even more useful. Like I said, we plan on using this. If we work it into more of a calendar view, I'll post in this thread.
Few of the demo parties, lan parties, conferences etc I've attended conformed to all, or even most, of these rules. This 'manifesto' would probably be more useful as a guide, or a conversation (wiki, forum). It's quite obvious that you need good network, power, registration etc, but how to actually go about doing it is less so.
8 ip addresses per attendee? That's a little high. It's incredibly hard to make DHCP work at that scale, and allocating 8 per attendee is wrong. Try 4 - if you're being nice - or 2 if you're constrained. (2 = one smartphone/tablet and a computer).
Especially on the sustenance and prizes sections: if you're putting together a Python-related Hack Day, the Python Software Foundation will throw some dough your way to make those happen. <a href="http://pythonsprints.com/" rel="nofollow">http://pythonsprints.com/</a>
Great list. Extremely handy.
Is it just me, or could there be some potential for a basic hackathon "event services", e.g. renting out ip ranges that have per-clearence for most social networks, etc.