Hack the Hackathon: Shaping the Future of Hackathon Research and Practice

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 in particular have embraced them as an opportunity for researchers to acquire skills that would be useful for their discipline and form collaborations within their disciplines and beyond. Such activities are necessary because many impactful discoveries occur at the interface between traditional scientific disciplines and statistics, computing, and data science. Over the past years, practitioners and researchers have acquired significant knowledge by organizing and studying hackathon events. However, knowledge about motivations and best practices is largely limited to single domains. What is currently missing is a higher-level view of the common motivations, goals, and best practices for scientific hackathons.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers of different disciplines studying hackathons and hackathon practitioners from different communities to meet and discuss the current state of practice and research around hackathons as well as future challenges. This workshop is aimed to be a first step of forming a larger, cohesive community around scientific hackathons. It provides a venue for exchange and a consolidation of best practices, resources for organizers, and also evaluation materials (e.g. surveys and interview scripts). Planned outcomes beyond these consolidated resources include an overview of possible types of hackathons and their uses for different disciplines, white papers on best practices that are applicable across domains, and new research programs and connections between practitioners and researchers of hackathons.