Time-bounded events such as hackathons, hackweeks, data dives, codefests, edit-a-thons and others have experienced a steep rise in popularity during the past decade. They started as competitive coding events in the early 2000s during which young developers formed small ad-hoc teams and engaged in short-term intense collaboration on projects that are of interest to them. Since then these events have proliferated into various domains including (scientific) communities, small, medium and large corporations, entrepreneurship, (higher) education, civic engagement and others. The extension into different domains also has broadened their focus ranging from fostering innovation and creating technical solutions to covering themes such as tackling social and environmental issues, supporting informal and collaborative learning and creating new or expanding and connecting existing communities.
Scientific communities in particular have embraced these events as an opportunity for researchers to acquire skills outside their discipline and form cross-disciplinary collaborations. Such activities are necessary because many impactful discoveries are occurring at the interface between traditional scientific disciplines and statistics, computing and data science. Traditional structures of scientific communication, education and exchange of knowledge often fall short in providing sufficient support mechanisms for such collaborations though.
In recent years, practitioners and researchers have acquired significant (practical) knowledge organizing and studying hackathon events. However, our understanding of motivations and best practices is largely limited to single domains and remains siloed. What is currently missing is a higher-level view of the common motivations, goals, and best practices for scientific hackathons. Similarly, it is instructive to uncover and understand differences between how different communities organize events in relation to their goals. While there were attempts in the past to organize workshops in specific domains that brought researchers and practitioners together, those attempts focused on a specific community. Understanding hackathons, uncovering their strengths and flaws and developing means to support organizers, participants and other stakeholders to successfully prepare, run and follow-up on an event is however not a task a single community can fulfill.
With this ongoing series of workshops we aim to bring together researchers and practitioners of hackathons and related events to meet and discuss the current state of practice and research around hackathons as well as future challenges. Our main purpose is to bring together the broad and expansive community of people who organize hackathons in both scientific and civic contexts, who study hackathons and their participants, and foster a growing and interdisciplinary community of learning and practice. What started with informal conversations between four hackathon organizers and researchers has grown into an ongoing workshop series and a number of ongoing projects. But we also know that our current reach is limited, and we are always looking to connect with any folks who are excited to think about how to organize these events, and how to make them welcoming spaces.