The 2nd Workshop on Hacking and Making at Time-Bounded Events
This work is incremental, focusing on synthesizing existing knowledge to improve the planning and design of hackathons for researchers and organizers in the CHI community.
The paper addresses the growing popularity and diversity of hackathon-style events, highlighting their potential for collaboration and challenges, with over 65,000 participants annually in collegiate hackathons alone. It reports on a workshop that brought together researchers and practitioners to share insights for better studying and designing these events as socio-technical systems.
In hackathons, small teams work together over a specified period of time to complete a project of interest. Such time-bounded hackathon-style events have become increasingly popular across different domains in recent years. Collegiate hackathons, just one of the many variants of hackathons, that are supported by the largest hackathon league (https://mlh.io/) alone attract over 65,000 participants among more than 200 events each year. Variously known as data dives, codefests, hack-days, sprints, edit-a-thons, mapathons, and so on, such events vary depending on different audiences and with divergent aims: for example, whether teams know each other beforehand, whether the event is structured as a competition with prizes, whether the event is open or requires membership or invitations, and whether the desired outcome is primarily a product innovation, learning a new skill, forming a community around a cause, solving a technical problem that requires intensive focus by a group, or just having fun. Taken together, hackathons offer new opportunities and challenges for collaboration by affording explicit, predictable, time-bounded spaces for collaborative work and engaging with new audiences. With the goal of discussing opportunities and challenges surrounding hackathons of different kinds, this one-day workshop brought together researchers, experienced event organizers, and practitioners to share and discuss their practical experiences. Empirical insights from studying these events may help position the CHI community to better study, plan and design hackathon-style events as socio-technical systems that support new modes of production and collaboration.