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Nine Lessons from Nine NESCent Hackathons |
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The NESCent hackathon model is a style of hackathon developed and refined over a period of 10 years, with primary sponsorship of the erstwhile National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), which was located in Durham, North Carolina, USA.
This style of hackathon, which typically lasted 5 days and involved about 30 people, was designed to serve a relatively small and widely dispersed academic discipline (computational evolutionary biology) facing challenges of interoperability, backed by a sponsor (NESCent) dedicated to nurturing a community of practice committed to open science and open software development.
At these hackathons, participants gathered on day 1 to discuss challenges and opportunities. By the end of the day, they had assembled into a small set of teams, each committed to a creative, collaborative project of its own design. On the remaining days, each team worked to produce tangible outcomes.
So that others might benefit from our experiences, we have attempted to condense these into a scholarly publication (entitled Community and Code: Nine Lessons from Nine NESCent Hackathons) and a data set, which is stored in this repository. We intend this to be of use for prospective sponsors of hackathons, for organizers, and for scientists seeking to study the hackathon phenomenon.
Hackathons come in many shapes and sizes. If your organization is thinking about sponsoring a hackathon, you may be considering what kind of hackathon to run, how much it will cost, how to organize it, and what kind of outcomes can be expected.
We provide a detailed guide to the process of organizing and staging a NESCent hackathon, which takes several months. The budget is predominantly for travel and lodging for the participants (plus administrative support), which depends heavily on the extent to which participants are recruited locally.
NESCent hackathons have intangible outcomes like building a shared awareness of challenges and opportunities within a community, and drawing attention to a sponsor's resources, as well as tangible outcomes such as source code, documentation, and installations. All teams produce tangible outcomes.
The typical team project ends when the hackathon ends, but frequently individuals or teams continue to work after the event to produce downstream outcomes, including software improvements, presentations, proposals for funding, and manuscripts for publication.
To find out if the NESCent model is right for you, consider, for example, the following:
- What are you looking to get out of it? For example, if you are looking to promote a particular technique or technology (such as a product of your organization) you might want to scope your hackathon narrower than was common in our approach. In our manuscript we do cite some examples of such hackathons that you might emulate, but we have always sought to advance our field in somewhat broad terms and so have encouraged our participants to take ownership of the exact scoping of our hackathons.
- What motivates your participants? Some hackathons that we've studied had competitions and gave out prizes, but in our own model, participants were motivated by a mixture of wanting to learn, wanting to interact with people they normally might not meet, improve the infrastructure in our research field, and become permanent contributors to a community of practice.
- How long can you claim your participants? Our hackathons were relatively long (usually five days). This is longer than many other hackathons, which often have a nature more of a 'code sprint' in comparison.
- Do you value the development of a diverse community? A substantial amount of our effort has gone into recruiting new contributors to our community, including people from traditionally underrepresented groups.
As a hackathon organizer (or prospective organizer), you may want to know how to show potential sponsors that hackathons are valuable, and you may be considering how to organize an event that is successful in advancing the sponsor's aims. The NESCent hackathon manuscript explains the kinds of outcomes and impacts that can be expected from a NESCent hackathon. We also provide a detailed guide to the process of organizing and staging a NESCent hackathon, a process that spans several months, at varying levels of intensity during different stages of the process.
This repository stores material developed for a project that aims to:
- Document the NESCent model, providing concise guidance for prospective organizers.
- Provide evidence of impact (useful for organizers to sell hackathons to sponsors).
- Convey lessons learned from our experience.
- Lay a foundation for future research (including a data framework and our suggestions about research methods and questions).
The files in this repository are organized at the top level as described below (the sub- folders also have descriptive documents in them with more information about the contents of that directory):