In order to ensure that your Startup Weekend experience goes exactly as it should, we've devised some best practice advice for attendees, organizers, and anyone else involved to read through.

Friday Night

• Friday night is all about getting together, meeting as many people as you can and then forming up teams around the top ideas that are pitches.  We'll usually try to give everyone a sense of who is actually at the event (developers, PR people, Biz Dev etc) so that group formation goes smoothly.
• Spend some time getting to know others at the event and realize that Startup Weekend is not a conference.  It is an opportunity to build community and work with great individuals interested in the same thing all while building an exciting project/company.

Rules to Live By:

1. Have fun, meet people, and make the most out of the event regardless of the idea and project you're working on
2. Leave your egos at the door -- we are all here for the same reason
3. Open ideas and open space = no NDAs or privacy agreements
4. Prepare to learn a lot
5. First and foremost, build community
6. Have more fun

Pitching and Idea Generation

On Friday night everyone gets together and pitches their ideas for projects to work on in either one or two minute segments.  From these pitches (somewhere between 20 & 50) groups will form up around a select few ideas depending on the number of attendees and move forward from there. Most of this depends on the number of people at a weekend but the gist of how it can go really stays the same.

One way to narrow down ideas is as follows:

• After the pitches, everyone in the room selects their top three ideas that they would like to work on
• From those top three votes, narrow down the ideas to only those with substantially more votes that the rest
• If there are still a few too many ideas in the mix, everyone should pick their top choice and from there, the remaining ideas are usually a good bet

Alternatively, most weekends work great with a self-selection process:

• Teams form naturally around ideas they think are interesting.  No limits on smallest groups or largest groups, just try to spread the developers around.

**It is important to note that this is not an exclusive process.  If there are ideas that don't make the vote but still want to be worked on by a group that is totally fine.  We just narrow things down to make group formation a little bit easier than self selection between 50 ideas.