Why do you hackathon?

Hackathons are not only limited to the corporate world, being also used by government agencies, city halls and NGOs. A type of issue-oriented hackathon, called civic hackathon by many, focuses on community issues, governance, public good and the like. This sort of event goes in a different direction of corporate hackathons, which concentrate on specific technologies and business opportunities.

Although my question giving the title of this post is directed to any type of hackathon, I’ve been a co-organizer of hackathons held by the City Hall of my town since 2013. I finally started to do research on that topic in 2016 and after looking for empirical studies about hackathons, I realized that academic research about it is very limited, given the size of the phenomenon.

After collecting so many different claims and arguments, we wanted to directly ask hackathon participants about what motivates them to participate in such events. The initial data we collected was from two civic hackathons we co-organized. After contacting the organizers of over 30 hackathons worldwide, most of them did not answer our emails. The few of them that were kind enough to answer did not agree to forward our survey to their event’s participants. There was only one case we achieved to get live contact with organizers and participants through the Slack channel of a hackathon that was going on in Australia. Then we started to ask colleagues that have been organizing or participating in hackathons to forward this survey. People from half a dozen of competitions could answer our survey, but our sample is limited to our network.

So, dear visitor who read the post this far, I kindly ask you: why do you hackathon?

Part of the text in this post was taken from a scholarly article of my authorship:

Gama, Kiev. (2017). “Crowdsourced Software Development in Civic Apps: Motivations of Civic Hackathons Participants”. 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems.

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