Evergreen is the eternal living knowledgebase for Purdue Hackers. It is a collection of resources, guides, and documentation, which are updated constantly as the org runs.
Evergreen is for:
- Current members & organizers of Purdue Hackers to access our values and practices in one place
- Future members & organizers of Purdue Hackers to understand the history of the org and build on top of it with greater context & intention
- Student org leaders at other schools who want to build more resilient orgs
- Anyone who wants to gain a deep understanding of what Purdue Hackers does
Purdue Hackers has been around since 2013, but very little of the first 10 years of its history was ever written down and has been lost to time. This made Purdue Hackers require constant reinvention from each generation of leadership, who could not learn from past mistakes & successes or build on top of previous values.
We believe that documentation is a core component of the solid foundation required to build resilient orgs. Without documentation, future student org leaders are forced to interpret its values and practices by playing a game of Telephone, which degrades it over time. From Galactic Empire:
Telephone is played when the current leader of an org looks to what their org did in previous years and attempts to repeat it without understanding it, thereby watering it down.
Telephone is caused by weak and/or uninspired leadership, and is generally a sign that the org will degrade or fail to meaningfully move forward. Too many years of Telephone will send an org barreling toward dark ages, establishing a Current that becomes very difficult to change.
Telephone is exceedingly common in student orgs, which have high turnover rates and no full-time leadership. It’s almost inevitable that every student org will suffer from Telephone at least once in its life, even if it is very strong at one point.
But good documentation is hard:
Creating and maintaining up-to-date documentation is something most orgs—not just student orgs—are bad at. It’s often lower priority because it’s not an immediate need, and the activation energy required to do it right is too high when it is needed. Student orgs are especially bad at this for the same reason they’re especially vulnerable to Telephone.
Evergreen is our attempt to ensure Purdue Hackers continues for the next 100 years and beyond. We also hope it can serve as inspiration for other student orgs who want their orgs to last just as long.
Types of things commonly included in Evergreen:
- Values and opinions
- Information about internal operations, e.g. team structure and programs
- Recaps/writeups/postmortems of individual events
- Technical guides, e.g. for designing & laser cutting Hack Night badges
- Information about internal infrastructure
- Design docs & RFCs for technical projects
Documentation containing potentially sensitive information, such as meeting notes and information about individual members, are also part of the Evergreen project, but instead stored in a private sister repository called dark-forest, with access given only to Organizers & Hack Bishops. That said, Evergreen is an open-source first initiative; everything is stored in this public repository unless there’s a good reason not to.
Anyone who feels they have something to contribute, including current members, organizers, and alumni, are encouraged to open a pull request to this repository with their contributions.
Evergreen is an open source effort, and we need your help. The Issues tab of this repository serves as a wishlist for things we would like to add to Evergreen.
Internally, Evergreen is viewed as a best-effort continuous improvement project. We prioritize overall coverage over thoroughness. Culturally, everyone from members to organizers are encouraged & expected to contribute a document to Evergreen when they facilitate something within the org.
Evergreen began in earnest in January 2025, and backfilling previous years is not a priority. Because of this, information from before 2025 is likely to be far more limited than from during & after 2025. If you have information from before 2025, including history of events, previous infrastructure, opinions & values, or meeting notes, please open a pull request. @rayhanadev can help if you need help getting started.