Hackers at EPFL is sustained (mostly) by external sponsorships. We are in contact with companies which embodied the hacking spirit since their inception. They are happy to support our activities on the EPFL campus, because they will foster creativity and technological excellence--the same kind of environment nurtured by such companies every single day.
Averaging 2 main events per semester (e.g., hackathons), we need a budget of roughly 20,000.- CHF per year. We estimate that a full-weekend hackathon requires approximately 4,000.- CHF, to cover the food expenses of ~50 participants (i.e., 4 meals along the 30 hours of the event). In total. 16,000.- CHF are reserved for the hackathons, and 4,000.- for smaller events, accessory expenses and overhead.
At discretion, we also accept donations from the association members, e.g., hardware kits for workshops, software licenses, books, copyrighted material, etc. but not money.
Hackers at EPFL wants to reach a wide-spectrum of passionate software developers, tinkerers and, in general, hackers. Becoming an acknowledged association grants us a higher credibility among the EPFL members, and the possibility of reaching periodically all the students via the internal mailing list. We also expect benefits in terms of reserving rooms for our periodical events (i.e., small rooms for tutorials, and larger ones for hackathons). On the other hand, we do not require a stable room for the association, as our archival requirements are minimal, and we prefer to rotate our events among many different buildings (so to reach more people). Last but not the least, although Hackers at EPFL is already endorsed by many faculty members, we expect our acknowledgment to drive more interest from professors. We foresee a certain number of members to be attracted directly by the endorsement of professors during their lectures.
EPFL is one of the top IT schools in the world. This result has been achieved raising the bar higher and higher, year after year, striving for anything but excellence. Hackers at EPFL adopts the same passion for excellence, and tries to distribute it among as many people as possible. Hackers at EPFL indeed becomes the meeting point for like-minded hackers, who before could have met only by chance.
Top U.S. universities greatly benefited from nurturing the hacking culture on campus. Starting from MIT (which spurred the movement), and ranging from Stanford to Berkeley, and many others, associations of hackers have proved to be invaluable--they were the seed of the open-source movement, the nest of many incubating startups (later become incredibly successful), the hive where students honed their coding skills to the max, etc.
It is difficult to assess the net benefit of an association which relies completely on the creativity and passion of its members, but we are confident that EPFL will become an even better place if hackers have a place where to share their (open)-knowledge.