Time-bounded collaborative events in which teams work together under intense time pressure are becoming increasingly popular. In 2015, collegiate hackathons alone attracted over 54,000 participants across 150 events. While "hackathons", that is, competitive overnight coding events, are one of the more prevalent examples of this phenomenon, there are many more distinct event design variations for different audiences and with divergent aims:
Taken together, these events offer new opportunities and challenges for cooperative work by affording explicit, predictable, time-bounded spaces for interdependent work and access to new audiences of collaborators.
This one-day workshop will bring together:
The workshop aims to facilitate consolidating existing research, sharing practical experiences, and understanding what benefits different event variations may offer, how they may be applied in other contexts, and how insights from studying these events may contribute to CSCW knowledge.
Topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to:
9:00AM-5:30PM
As part of CSCW 2017: the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Co-Operative Work and Social Computing.
(Conference registration is NOT required to attend the workshop.)
| Time | Activity |
|---|---|
| 09:00AM - 10:00AM | Boaster introductions (2 minutes each, no slides) |
| 10:00AM - 10:30AM |
"A Typology of Hackathon Events" PDF Margaret Drouhard, Anissa Tanweer and Brittany Fiore-Gartland Discussant: Victoria Schwanda Sosik PDF |
| 10:30AM - 11:00AM | COFFEE BREAK |
| 11:00AM - 11:30AM |
"Community and Code: Lessons from NESCent hackathons" PDF Arlin Stoltzfus Discussant: Dannon Baker |
| 11:30AM - 12:00PM |
"The CHI4Good Day of Service: What is Produced?" PDF Emily Porter, Chris Bopp, Elizabeth Gerber and Amy Voida Discussant: Kenny Joseph PDF |
| 12:00PM - 12:30PM |
"Building Something Amazing: 4 years of Ohio State's Hackathon Program" Arnab Nandi and Meris Mandernach Discussant: Erin Hoffman |
| 12:30PM - 02:00PM | LUNCH |
| 02:00PM - 02:30PM |
OPEN SPACE 1
|
| 02:30PM - 03:00PM |
OPEN SPACE 2
|
| 03:00PM - 03:30PM |
"Participatory Research in Open Science Events" PDF Aurelia Moser Discussant: Vassilis-Javed Khan PDF |
| 03:30PM - 04:00PM | COFFEE BREAK |
| 04:00PM - 04:30PM |
"Community Data Science Workshop" PDF Jonathan Morgan, Dharma Dailey and Mako Hill Discussant: Brittany Fiore-Gartland PDF |
| 04:30PM - 05:00PM |
Panel: Ryan Curtin PDF & Chris Holdgraf PDF Thinking through event design: challenges and opportunities for the future Discussant: Erik Trainer PDF |
| 05:00PM - 05:30PM |
WRAP-UP Synthesis of work presented, summary of insights, and concrete next steps for action Discussant: Anna Filippova PDF |
| 07:00PM onwards | DINNER / SOCIAL OFF-SITE |
A little more about us!
Anna Filippova is a postdoctoral researcher with the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University, where she studies the role of events in supporting open collaborative community development. She has several years of experience in organizing open source community events, including large-scale conferences like Abstractions and Red Dot Ruby, and monthly meet-ups. Her Ph.D work with the National University of Singapore examined the impact of different forms of conflict on Free and Open Source Software development. She has also studied group norm evolution and normative conflict in virtual spaces and open collaborative communities.
Brad Chapman is a research scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He develops open source tools for analyzing biological data, and organizes yearly Codefest working sessions for the open source bioinformatics community. This years Codefest was the 7th, with an increased focus on community engagement and training (https://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Codefest2 016).
R. Stuart Geiger is an ethnographer and post-doctoral scholar at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at UCBerkeley, where he studies the infrastructures and institutions that support the production of knowledge. His Ph.D research at the UC-Berkeley School of Information focused on the governance and operation of Wikipedia and scientific research networks. He has studied topics including newcomer socialization, moderation and quality control, specialization and professionalization, cooperation and conflict, the roles of support staff and technicians, and diversity and inclusion.
James D. Herbsleb is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he serves as Director of the PhD program in Societal Computing. His research interests focus on global software development, open source, and more generally on collaboration and coordination in software projects. He was recently awarded the SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award in 2016, and previously the Alan Newell Award for Research Excellence in 2014. He has served on the PC of several conferences, including ICSE and FSE, was co-chair of CSCW 2004, and served as an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.
Arun Kalyanasundaram is a PhD student in the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University. His research involves studying coordination and collaboration in open-source software. He has performed ethnographic studies of hackathons to understand their socio-technical outcomes and their impact on building scientific software communities.
Aurelia Moser is a developer and curious chemist-cartographer building communities around code at the Mozilla Science Lab. She works particularly on outreach and event development for Mozilla’s convenings programs, including the Working Open Workshop, Global Sprint, Mozfest, and Fellowship Research Jams. Previously of Ushahidi, Internews Kenya, and Carto, she’s been working in the open tech and non-profit space for a few years, and recent projects have had mapping sensor data to support agricultural security, citizen science, and sustainable apis ecosystems in the Global South.
Arlin Stoltzfus is a Research Biologist at the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (Genome-scale Measurements Group, NIST), where his work focuses on issues in molecular evolution, bioinformatics, and evolu-tionary theory, using computer-based approaches. He also develops software and participates in community efforts to improve interoperability of software and data used in evolutionary analysis. He was part of the group of scientists that, over a 10-year period, developed and refined the hackathon model used at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), a US National Science Foundation-funded research center. He continues to plan and facilitate timebounded cooperative events
Erik Trainer is a post-doctoral researcher in the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD in Information Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine in 2012. His research focuses on creating technologies and practices that support the relationships of people engaged in technical work, especially in open-source software development and software production in science.
We would also like to acknowledge the invaluable feedback of Meg Drouhard, Arnab Nandi and Margaret-Anne Storey in the development of the workshop.