Community and Code: Nine Lessons from Nine NESCent Hackathons

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an explosion in the popularity of hackathonscreative, participant-driven meetings at which software developers gather for an intensive bout of programming, often organized in teams. Hackathons have tangible and intangible outcomes, such as code, excitement, learning, networking, and so on, whose relative merits are unclear. For example, a frequent complaint is that code is abandoned when the hackathon ends, and questions like, "which outcomes are produced most reliably?" and, "how valuable are they for participants, organizers, and sponsors?" remain open. As a first step in giving "hackology" a more rigorous footing, this paper describes the NESCent hackathon model, developed over the course of a decade to serve the academic discipline of evolutionary biology, with the dual goals of augmenting the community's shared software infrastructure, and fostering a diverse community of practice in open scientific software development. The paper presents a detailed guide to staging a NESCent-style hackathon, along with a structured information set on nine events involving 54 team projects. NESCent hackathons have produced tangible products with downstream impacts, including prototypes that were leveraged for major funding, incremental additions to production code bases, and creative drafts (designs, standards, and proofs-of-concept) that contributed to further work. The impacts of intangible outcomes could not be assessed objectively, but the subjective experience suggests that hackathons have a positive impact by (1) providing individuals with valuable experiences, networking, and training, and (2) fostering a more cohesive community of practice by enhancing awareness of challenges and best practices and by building links of familiarity between and among resources and people. Future research that recognizes the diverse outcomes of hackathons might enable evidence-based decisions about how to design hackathons for effectiveness.

Interconnecting Systems Using Machine-Actionable Data Management Plans – Hackathon Report

“…With the idea of broadening the maDMP community, improving the current DCS application profile and promoting its adoption, a hackathon was organised from the 27 th to the 29 th of May 2020. A hackathon is a programming-oriented event where participants gather together to collaboratively work at an intensive pace towards possible solutions to some particular challenges (Briscoe, 2014;Garcia et al, 2020;Stoltzfus et al, 2017). Such solutions are created by interdisciplinary teams including, for instance, domain experts, designers and developers.…”

Development of the Innovative Potential of Young People on the Basis of the Use of the University Hackathon Ecosystem

“…In the era of formation of new technological space, changes in socio-cultural environment there is a social demand for a personality, who is able to live and work productively in conditions of global changes, uncertainty, challenges. In this situation, the issues related to human development corresponding to these transformations are actualized, and the sphere of education is considered as the most important factor of reproduction of "human capital", which determines the further progressive development of the country (Stoltzfus et al, 2017).…”

“…An important component of the modern educational process in higher education institutions is the development of innovative potential of students. A. Stoltzfus, M. Rosenberg, H. Lapp, analyzing the concept "innovation potential", first of all, distinguish personal qualities of a person (tolerance to uncertainty, ability to justified risk, responsibility, need for self-realization, motivation of achievement, reflexivity, creativity (qualities of intellect, intellectual initiative); competence, ability to interact with other people, features of value and semantic sphere, working capacity, self-regulation level (Stoltzfus et al, 2017).…”

Ten simple rules to run a successful BioHackathon

“…Unconferences differ from conferences in key ways: while conferences have a predefined set of presenters together with an audience, unconferences promote more collaborative and spontaneous interactions across participants [1]. A "hackathon" is a special kind of unconference in which people come together to state, discuss, and solve problems by means of collaborative brainstorming, modeling, design, coding, testing, and documenting [2]. Despite the "hack" portion in the term, hackathons welcome not only software developers but anyone involved in creating solutions that can be later consumed or exposed via software.…”

“…BioHackathons are recognized as having a growing impact and purpose within the life sciences community. Some of these events have been running for more than a decade; e.g., the first BioHackathon was organized by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) [6] in 2002, followed by the NBDC/DBCLS BioHackathon series, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) hackathon series [2], and the OpenBio Codefest event organized by the OBF and usually held right before the annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) meeting. In recent years, we have seen an increasing number of these events running independently or as a part of traditional conferences.…”