I stumbled on some pages with links to multiple hackathon how-to documents (e.g., this).
I appreciated the distinction made here between 3 different kinds of hackathons:
- Community hackathons typically gather programmers using specific languages or tools, such as Python or Ruby on Rails. Participants come to meet new people, learn, compete and have fun, so they typically work on whatever they want to.
- Corporate hackathons bring together outside developers specifically to work with a company’s code, APIs or products.
- Internal hackathons invite company employees to spread their creative wings and interact with colleagues in new ways.
The hackathons described in most documents are 1-day corporate or community hackathons. They are often held in large cities where they can attract local talent for free. They can be very cheap to run because nothing is provided other than space, internet and food. There is often a judged competition for best projects. The corporate model is like the recent OpenTree hackathon in the sense of being sponsored by some organization that has a resource or an API that they want to showcase, and the hackathon allows them to generate involvement and interest within a community even when they don’t get a lot of tangible products.
In the case of an internal hackathon, you already have the talent locally. You just need to give them time off of their regular projects. See a nice little piece on an internal hackathons.
In spite of the differences some of the issues are the same, e.g., as in this guidance on expectations. One reflection on hackathons from the Knight Foundation says something familiar:
Too rarely have the good app ideas started through these sessions been taken across the finish line and sustained after the weekend has ended. And, too many of the leanings and too much of the code from these sessions is forgotten or not shared with a broader audience.
Our hackathons are a kind of small community hackathon, more like what is described in the Open Data hackathon guide, although that is also describing a 1-day event. Some guidelines are suggested in a NESCent whitepaper.
Started with a simple query in PubMed with "hackathon OR hackathons", which (when I did it i.e. 25.02.2015) matched 7 articles.
To me, the most releveant seem to be:
1 Community-driven development for computational biology at Sprints, Hackathons and Codefests. BMC Bioinformatics. 2014;15 Suppl 14:S7. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-15-S14-S7. Epub 2014 Nov 27. Möller S, Afgan E, Banck M, Bonnal RJ, Booth T, Chilton J, Cock PJ, Gumbel M, Harris N, Holland R, Kalaš M, Kaján L, Kibukawa E, Powel DR, Prins P, Quinn J, Sallou O, Strozzi F, Seemann T, Sloggett C, Soiland-Reyes S, Spooner W, Steinbiss S, Tille A, Travis AJ, Guimera R, Katayama T, Chapman BA.
This one describes experiences linked to several different sets of hackathons etc. Scanning it quickly, it is more about describing and documenting the features of and differences between the different events, rather than providing guidelines for making them more/less successful, although these issues are mentioned in the text.
2 Crowdsourcing knowledge discovery and innovations in medicine. J Med Internet Res. 2014 Sep 19;16(9):e216. doi: 10.2196/jmir.3761. Celi LA, Ippolito A, Montgomery RA, Moses C, Stone DJ.
As the title suggests, it's a discussion of application of ways of opening up discovery in medicine outside of clinicians. The authors have been involved in organising several hackathons, as described in the quote below
The authors of this article have helped organize numerous hackathons and data marathons that have brought together engineers, data scientists, and clinicians (including nurses, pharmacists, and other allied health personnel) to address problems and questions identified during routine clinical practice, including the Critical Data Marathon held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in January 2014 (see Multimedia Appendix 1). To date, the MIT Hacking Medicine has organized 17 events in the United States, India, Uganda, and Spain
There then follow some anecdotal examples of successes/benefits of such hackathons, but no detailed description of what makes them work particularly well
3 Less noise, more hacking: how to deploy principles from MIT's hacking medicine to accelerate health care. Int J Technol Assess Health Care. 2014 Jul;30(3):260-4. doi: 10.1017/S0266462314000324. Epub 2014 Aug 6. DePasse JW, Carroll R, Ippolito A, Yost A, Santorino D, Chu Z, Olson KR.
A more detailed description of the format and results of the hackathons described in 2. above
4 Enriched biodiversity data as a resource and service. Biodivers Data J. 2014 Jun 16;(2):e1125. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.2.e1125. eCollection 2014. Vos RA, Biserkov JV, Balech B, Beard N, Blissett M, Brenninkmeijer C, van Dooren T, Eades D, Gosline G, Groom QJ, Hamann TD, Hettling H, Hoehndorf R, Holleman A, Hovenkamp P, Kelbert P, King D, Kirkup D, Lammers Y, DeMeulemeester T, Mietchen D, Miller JA, Mounce R, Nicolson N, Page R, Pawlik A, Pereira S, Penev L, Richards K, Sautter G, Shorthouse DP, Tähtinen M, Weiland C, Williams AR, Sierra S.
Rutger's first author on this - it focuses on a fairly detailed description of the specific projects developed during "The Biodiversity Data Enrichment Hackathon.", not much focus on how-tos, tips on running them successfully.
5 Phylotastic! Making tree-of-life knowledge accessible, reusable and convenient. BMC Bioinformatics. 2013 May 13;14:158. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-14-158. Stoltzfus A, Lapp H, Matasci N, Deus H, Sidlauskas B, Zmasek CM, Vaidya G, Pontelli E, Cranston K, Vos R, Webb CO, Harmon LJ, Pirrung M, O'Meara B, Pennell MW, Mirarab S, Rosenberg MS, Balhoff JP, Bik HM, Heath TA, Midford PE, Brown JW, McTavish EJ, Sukumaran J, Westneat M, Alfaro ME, Steele A, Jordan G.
Guess there's not much need to comment on this, given most of us are authors on it! My first very quick scan of it would sumarise it as focusing mostly on the product and method (in terms of the meeting/hackathon) of producing it, not on what works/doesn't work when delivering a hackathon. Incidently, I'm off for chicken wings with Emily McTavish this evening, another one of your co-authors on this paper :)
6 [Meeting Report: Hackathon-Workshop on Darwin Core and MIxS Standards Alignment (February 2012)] (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3570805/) Stand Genomic Sci. 2012 Oct 10;7(1):166-70. doi: 10.4056/sigs.3166513. Epub 2012 Sep 28. Tuama EÓ1, Deck J, Dröge G, Döring M, Field D, Kottmann R, Ma J, Mori H, Morrison N, Sterk P, Sugawara H, Wieczorek J, Wu L, Yilmaz P.
What the title suggests - a short report on a hackthon, focused on describing its aims and outcomes
7 Meeting report from the first meetings of the Computational Modeling in Biology Network (COMBINE). Stand Genomic Sci. 2011 Nov 30;5(2):230-42. doi: 10.4056/sigs.2034671. Le Novère N, Hucka M, Anwar N, Bader GD, Demir E, Moodie S, Sorokin A.
This article gives a more detailed description of the relevant meetings than in 6, and also follows up some more reflective sections on
- "What could have been done differently?"
- "What worked well and should be repeated?"
There are several other 'academic' articles that can be found by doing the same search in Web of Science - this file is a list of the titles and abstracts (where available) - this includes the "2006 NESCent Phyloinformatics Hackathon: A Field Report" article in Evolutionary Bioniformatics.
8 StitchFest: Diversifying a College Hackathon to Broaden Participation and Perceptions in Computing. Proceeding SIGCSE '15 Proceedings of the 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education Pages 114-119. Gabriela T. Richard, Yasmin B. Kafai, Barrie M. Adleberg, Orkan Telhan
Some interesting discussions about how to broaden participation and diversity.