Hi, my name is Alexander Nolte.
And in this video, I will present our work
on Hackathon project continuation
together with Irene-Angelica Chounta and James Herbsleb.
Hackathon are a time-bounded events,
which typically last between two and five
days during which people gather together and form teams.
Each of which attempts to complete a project of interest
to them.
In this research, we particularly
focus on co-located events.
When research on such events has grown considerably
in the last few years, most work focuses on the event itself.
The question what happens to hackathon projects
after an event has ended, has not
been addressed beyond studies on single events so far.
This is surprising since hackathons are typically
organized with specific goals in mind, such as creating
new and innovative products, fostering entrepreneurship,
and others, which arguably require full of activity.
Moreover, focusing on studies of similar events
does not allow us to gain insights
beyond the confines of those events that
take place in a specific domain or context.
All work aims to address this gap
by focusing on the question, what
happens to hackathon projects after an event has ended?
And which aspects may be associated
with technical project continuation?
To identify aspects that can reasonably
be expected to facilitate project continuation,
we examined existing literature, and identified
two main groups of aspects.
These relate to task completion and motivation.
Task completion refers to the progress
that a team makes on their project during a hackathon.
It can be expected that the more progress they make,
the more likely it is for them to continue
their project after an event.
One example for an aspect that can foster task completion
is skill matching, since it can be expected
that a fit between a team skills and technical project
requirements can allow them to develop a more polished
prototype during hackathon.
Motivation can come from different sources,
one example for that is a team winning a prize at a hackathon.
As a basis for our study, we used an excerpt
of the hackathon database deaf post
which contains information about hackathon projects
and participants.
To study project continuation, we
analyzed GitHub repositories that
were connected to hackathon projects lifted in desk post.
In total, our study covers 592 projects
that 1912 participants attempted during 73 different hackathons.
Our analysis revealed that only about 35% of all projects
showed any continuation activity.
It also showed that for the majority of projects,
the activity only lasted until six days.
And that few projects survive long term.
We then examine the influence of the different factors
we identified from related work on project continuation.
We conducted two separate analysis
for short and long-term continuation.
We first studied short-term continuation until day six
after a hackathon using logistic regression.
We found that teams who worked on the GitHub repository
prior to the event that won one of the few prizes
at a large hackathon, and that attempted a project that
required them to use a large amount
of different technologies were more likely to continue
the project short-term.
In addition, we also conducted a survival analysis
using Cox regression to study long-term continuation.
This analysis revealed that teams
who attempted projects that were within their skill set, that
had diverse skills, and that intended
to expand the reach of their project
after the event were more likely continue
their project long-term.
The intention to expand the reach
of a project in this context refers
to them attempting to expand their user base
or acquire funding.
We also found that intensive short-term continuation
activity was detrimental to long-term project continuation.
In generally, we can thus conclude
that most hackathon projects actually get discontinued.
Moreover, we found the teams exhibit different types
of continuation behavior, because some teams appear
to mainly focused on polishing their prototypes,
while not exhibiting any long-term intention
towards their projects.
We also found that short and long-term continuation
were predicated by completely different aspects
as shown in the previous slide.
What continuation intentions in general did not have an effect,
we found specific intentions to be relevant related
to long-term continuation.
All these findings can serve as insights
for hackathon organizers and participants
that aim to foster project continuation after an event has
ended.
Thank you for listening to this presentation,
and you will find more information about our work
on hackathons in the listed ResearchGate project
and on the website of the hackathon planning kit.