Motivation and Rationale

Time-bounded events such as hackathons, hackweeks, data dives, codefests, edit-a-thons, and others have become a common form of collaboration in various domains. Scientific communities and civic communities in particular have embraced them as opportunities for researchers to acquire skills that are useful for their work and to form collaborations within their disciplines and beyond. 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.

Our understanding of both short-term and long-term outcomes is also still very limited: in what contexts are hackathons useful? Are there concrete outcomes we can and should measure, possibly across domains? What instruments should we use to measure them? How can we organize an event to foster specific outcomes? There is little exchange of knowledge between organizers and researchers of different domains leading to a fragmentation of knowledge and potential costly repetition of common mistakes. This fragmentation inhibits progress: grand challenges requiring the collaboration of individuals from different disciplines remain unaddressed.

Based on the understanding that there is a need for a cross-disciplinary space for organizers and researchers of hackathons we conducted a first workshop titled Hack the Hackathon: Shaping the Future of Hackathon Research and Practice in December 2021 hosted by the Lorentz Center (Leiden, The Netherlands) and a second follow-up workshop in October 2022 at the Flatiron Institute (New York City, USA).

While the first two workshops were effective at bringing together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners, building a community and developing and driving forward interdisciplinary initiatives is a larger, continuing endeavour. In addition, the first two workshop focused largely on hackathons within scientific research communities, and we rapidly identified the need to bring in a wider range of practitioners, especially from civic spaces. With this in mind, we organized ''Hack the Hackathon: Volume 3'' at the SGD Innovation Space in Geneva, Switzerland on Nov 6-10, 2023. The aim of this third workshop was to build upon the accomplishments of the first two: to grow and consolidate the community that came together previously, to include a wide range of practitioners and researchers new to this workshop series, to take up new initiatives related to hackathons and other participant-driven events, and to develop a broad research agenda for this field.

Results

During Hack the Hackathon 3 we saw two different sprints - one over the duration of Hack the Hackathon 3, and one at the UN Library.

Organizers

• Allissa Dillman - CEO, BioData Sage, Bethesda, MD, USA
• Joseph Gum - Data Stewardship Coordinator, NSF NCAR - The National Center for Atmospheric Research, San Diego, CA, USA
• Mari Hanikat - CEO and Member of the Board, Garage48, Tallinn, Estonia
• Daniela Huppenkothen - Staff Scientist and NWO WISE Fellow, SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Leiden, The Netherlands
• Ines Knäpper - Innovation and Hackathon Lead, World Economic Forum, Geneva, Switzerland
• Thomas Maillart - President, opengeneva, Geneva, Switzerland
• Alexander Nolte - Associate Professor of Information Systems, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
• Je'aime Powell - Senior Systems Administrator and Technical Research Design Analyst, Texas Advanced Computing Center, Austin, TX, USA
• Reshama Shaikh - Director, Data Umbrella, New York, NY, USA
• Erik Tollerud - Associate Astronomer, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA