The Future of Hackathon Research and Practice

IEEE Access, vol. 12, pp. 133406–133425

Abstract

Hackathons are time-bounded collaborative events that have become a global phenomenon and are adopted by researchers and practitioners in a plethora of contexts. Hackathon events generally accelerate the development of scientific results and collaborations, communities, and innovative prototypes that address urgent challenges. As hackathons have been adopted in numerous different contexts, the events have also been adapted in numerous ways that correspond to the unique needs and situations of organizers, participants, and other stakeholders. While these interdisciplinary adaptions, in general, afford numerous advantages—such as tailoring the format to specific needs—they also entail certain challenges: limited exchange of best practices, limited exchange of research findings, and larger overarching questions that require interdisciplinary collaboration are not discovered and remain unanswered. To address these challenges, we call for interdisciplinary collaborations. As an initial initiative toward this, we performed an interdisciplinary collaborative analysis in the context of a workshop at the Lorentz Center, Leiden. In this paper, we report the results of this analysis in terms of six important areas that we envision will contribute to deepening hackathon research and practice: (1) hackathons for different purposes, (2) socio-technical event design, (3) scaling up, (4) making hackathons equitable, (5) studying hackathons, and (6) establishing hackathon goals and determining how to achieve them. We present these areas with respect to the state-of-the-art research proposals and conclude the paper by suggesting the next steps required for advancing hackathon research and practice.

Authors 10

1. Jeanette Falk

   Aalborg University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark

2. Alexander Nolte

   Eindhoven University of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Eindhoven University of Technology, AP Eindhoven, The Netherlands

3. Daniela Huppenkothen Aachen SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research

   Space Research Organisation Netherlands

   Affiliation as printed

   SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Leiden, The Netherlands

4. Marion Weinzierl

   University of Cambridge

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K

5. Kiev Santos da Gama

   Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

   Affiliation as printed

   Centro de Informática, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

6. Daniel Spikol

   University of Copenhagen

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

7. Erik J. Tollerud

   Space Telescope Science Institute

   Affiliation as printed

   Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA

8. Neil Chue Hong

   Software Sustainability Institute · University of Edinburgh

   Affiliation as printed

   Software Sustainability Institute, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, Edinburgh, U.K

9. Ines Knäpper

   World Economic Forum

   Affiliation as printed

   World Economic Forum, Geneva, Switzerland

10. Linda Hayden

    Elizabeth City State University

    Affiliation as printed

    Mathematics and Computer Science Department, Elizabeth City State University, Elizabeth City, NC, USA