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Title: How to Hackathon: Socio-technical Tradeoffs in Brief, Intensive Collocation
Hackathons are events where people who are not normally collocated converge for a few days to write code together. Hackathons, it seems, are everywhere. We know that long- term collocation helps advance technical work and facilitate enduring interpersonal relationships, but can similar benefits come from brief, hackathon-style collocation? How do participants spend their time preparing, working face-to- face, and following through these brief encounters? Do the activities participants select suggest a tradeoff between the social and technical benefits of collocation? We present results from a multiple-case study that suggest the way that hackathon-style collocation advances technical work varies across technical domain, community structure, and expertise of participants. Building social ties, in contrast, seems relatively constant across hackathons. Results from different hackathon team formation strategies suggest a tradeoff between advancing technical work and building social ties. Our findings have implications for technology support that needs to be in place for hackathons and for understanding the role of brief interludes of collocation in loosely-coupled, geographically distributed work.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1064209 1111750 0943168 1322278
PAR ID:
10038304
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1116 to 1128
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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