The Future of Hackathon Research and Practice

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 are generally used to 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 regarding the state of the art and research proposals and conclude the paper by suggesting the next steps required for advancing hackathon research and practice.