Understanding and improving the culture of hackathons: Think global hack local

Abstract

Hackathons bring developers, artists and designers together around a shared challenge: ideate, plan and create an application in a highly constrained time frame. A way to socialize, solve problems, and strengthen soft and hard skills, hackathons have grown tremendously in popularity in the last half decade. Despite this growth, it has been noted that females do not participate in hackathons with the same frequency as males. Some theorize that the hackathon culture is intimidating, does not appeal to women, or that it acts to amplify pre-existing cultural biases in computing. In this paper we introduce an alternative format for hackathons to address these issues. Think Global Hack Local (TGHL) is a non-competitive, communitybased hackathon that connects non-profit organizations with student developers. Students donate a weekend to solve problems that these organizations otherwise lack the resources to solve. To date, there have been two TGHL hackathons, and we have observed many interesting divergences within the culture of TGHL in comparison to other hackathons. Response has been positive, and nearly all of them indicate that they would do it again. By adopting some of these ideas, we believe that hackathons can become an environment that is more inclusive and fun for all.

Community Inventor Days

“…The most notable example of collaborative making events are hackathons: intensive sprints, traditionally around the development of code. Although hackathons have been mostly associated with software developers, with associated difficulties around inclusion [9,21], there has been a recent shift towards more diverse mediums and audiences. This has included an increasing number of "hackathons with no hacking" [24] that focus more explicitly on the generation of ideas and the "performance of innovation" [24].…”

On the Use of Hackathons to Enhance Collaboration in Large Collaborative Projects : - A Preliminary Case Study of the MegaM@Rt2 EU Project -

“…1. Hofstede country charts comparison example [8] Decker et al [11] argued that hackathon culture is usually intimidating. They proposed an alternative non-competitive, community-based format for hackathons called Think Global Hack Local (TGHL), which is aimed at making hackathons more inclusive and fun for all participants.…”

Everybody's Hacking

“…Beyond these structural elements, many events share a common goal of bringing people together who might not normally encounter each other and creating dialogue between people with different skills and knowledge [13,26,28]. Another is the playful and performative nature of the events and the spirit of exploration [5,9,16]. Elsewhere, many of these key properties are shared with jams, a term which has been particularly popular in gaming [16] and service design [27].…”

“…However, it is not always clear what these hackathons intend to achieve [23] or how "useful" they might be in meaningfully impacting the issue [24]. They also present significant problems in terms of diversity [5,25]: attending a 48-hour intensive event can be unattractive to many people, but might specifically exclude people with childcare responsibilities, for example.…”

“…We also see the degree to which hackathon participants shape the process, mirroring recent calls to better support participants in doing this [36]. However, other aspects of hackathons are problematic from a participation perspective, as some of their defining characteristics are widely acknowledged as creating diversity issues [5,25]. seek to better understand how hackathons are being appropriated for different audiences and what we might learn from these events to inform the configuration of our own participatory activities.…”