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Understanding Hackathons for Science: Collaboration, Affordances, and Outcomes

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Information in Contemporary Society (iConference 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11420))

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Abstract

Nowadays, hackathons have become a popular way of bringing people together to engage in brief, intensive collaborative work. Despite being a brief activity, being collocated with team members and focused on a task—radical collocation—could improve collaboration of scientific software teams. Using a mixed-methods study of participants who attended two hackathons at Space Telescope Science Institute, we examined how hackathons can facilitate collaboration in scientific software teams which typically involve members from two different disciplines: science and software engineering. We found that hackathons created a focused interruption-free working environment in which team members were able to assess each other’s skills, focus together on a single project and leverage opportunities to exchange knowledge with other collocated participants, thereby allowing technical work to advance more efficiently. This study suggests “hacking” as a new and productive form of collaborative work in scientific software production.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Major League Hacking, MLH. https://mlh.io.

  2. 2.

    Astro Hack Week. http://astrohackweek.org/2018/.

  3. 3.

    The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. http://www.stsci.edu/institute/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Ei Pa Pa Pe-Than & James D. Herbsleb

Authors
  1. Ei Pa Pa Pe-Than
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  2. James D. Herbsleb
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Correspondence to Ei Pa Pa Pe-Than .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    Natalie Greene Taylor

  2. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Caitlin Christian-Lamb

  3. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Michelle H. Martin

  4. University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Bonnie Nardi

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Pe-Than, E.P.P., Herbsleb, J.D. (2019). Understanding Hackathons for Science: Collaboration, Affordances, and Outcomes. In: Taylor, N., Christian-Lamb, C., Martin, M., Nardi, B. (eds) Information in Contemporary Society. iConference 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11420. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15741-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15742-5

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