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Going Beyond The Challenge!: Investigating The Aspects That Attract People to Participate in Hackathons

Published: 22 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Hackathons are events where their participants face the challenge of working intensively and collaboratively with other people. In these events, the participants have the opportunity to develop functional prototypes and solutions to real problems in a short time period (one to three days). Those kind of events have become increasingly popular and spread to several fields of knowledge. Also, they have been adopted by many organizations over the world. However, there is little scientific data that explains why people have participated in hackathons. In this paper, we report findings from an exploratory study in two hackathons organized by a big IT company. We aim to understand why their participants have voluntarily participated in such events. We identified four sets of motivational factors: technical, social, individual and business motivations. Technical motivations are associated with skill acquisition, while social motivations are related to the interaction between people during the event. Also, individual motivations are associated with a sense of autonomy and enjoyment of work. Finally, business motivations include the opportunity of publicizing work and the possibility of establishing partnerships. Our findings contributes to a broader understanding of the motivations for participating in hackathons, as well as providing recommendations for the organization of such events.

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  • (2023)An Exploratory Study of the Benefits of Time-bounded Collaborative Events for Startup Founders2023 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE)10.1109/CHASE58964.2023.00014(43-55)Online publication date: May-2023

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cover image ACM Other conferences
IHC '18: Proceedings of the 17th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems
October 2018
488 pages
ISBN:9781450366014
DOI:10.1145/3274192
© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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Published: 22 October 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Collocation
  2. Corporate Hackathons
  3. Engagement
  4. Motivation

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IHC '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 42 of 166 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 331 of 973 submissions, 34%

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  • (2023)An Exploratory Study of the Benefits of Time-bounded Collaborative Events for Startup Founders2023 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE)10.1109/CHASE58964.2023.00014(43-55)Online publication date: May-2023

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