Search for: All records

We show that recent work of Song implies that torsion‐free hyperbolic groups with Gromov boundary arerealized as fundamental groups of closed 3‐manifolds of constant negative curvature if and only if the solution to an associated spherical Plateau problem for group homology is isometric to such a 3‐manifold, and suggest some related questions.

 

Hackathons and similar time-bounded events have become a popular form of collaboration in various domains. They are commonly organized as in-person events during which teams engage in intense collaboration over a short period of time to complete a project that is of interest to them. Most research to date has thus consequently focused on studying how teams collaborate in a co-located setting, pointing towards the advantages of radical co-location. The global pandemic of 2020, however, has led to many hackathons moving online, which challenges our current understanding of how they function. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting findings from a multiple-case study of 10 hackathon teams that participated in 4 hackathon events across two continents. By analyzing the collected data, we found that teams merged synchronous and asynchronous means of communication to maintain a common understanding of work progress as well as to maintain awareness of each other's tasks. Task division was self-assigned based on individual skills or interests, while leaders emerged from different strategies (e.g., participant experience, the responsibility of registering the team in an event). Some of the affordances of in-person hackathons, such as the radical co-location of team members, could be partially reproduced in teams that kept open synchronous communication channels while working (i.e., shared audio territories), in a sort of "radical virtual co-location". However, others, such as interactions with other teams, easy access to mentors, and networking with other participants, decreased. In addition, the technical constraints of the different communication tools and platforms brought technical problems and were overwhelming to participants. Our work contributes to understanding the virtual collaboration of small teams in the context of online hackathons and how technologies and event structures proposed by organizers imply this collaboration. 

Hackathons have become popular events for teams to collaborate on projects and develop software prototypes. Most existing research focuses on activities during an event with limited attention to the evolution of the hackathon code.

We aim to understand the evolution of code used in and created during hackathon events, with a particular focus on the code blobs, specifically, how frequently hackathon teams reuse pre-existing code, how much new code they develop, if that code gets reused afterwards, and what factors affect reuse.

We collected information about 22,183 hackathon projects from Devpost and obtained related code blobs, authors, project characteristics, original author, code creation time, language, and size information from World of Code. We tracked the reuse of code blobs by identifying all commits containing blobs created during hackathons and identifying all projects that contain those commits. We also conducted a series of surveys in order to gain a deeper understanding of hackathon code evolution that we sent out to hackathon participants whose code was reused, whose code was not reused, and developers who reused some hackathon code.

9.14% of the code blobs in hackathon repositories and 8% of the lines of code (LOC) are created during hackathons and around a third of the hackathon code gets reused in other projects by both blob count and LOC. The number of associated technologies and the number of participants in hackathons increase reuse probability.

The results of our study demonstrates hackathons are not always “one-off” events as the common knowledge dictates and it can serve as a starting point for further studies in this area.

 

Background: Hackathons have become popular events for teams to collaborate on projects and develop software prototypes. Most existing research focuses on activities during an event with limited attention to the evolution of the code brought to or created during a hackathon. Aim: We aim to understand the evolution of hackathon-related code, specifically, how much hackathon teams rely on pre-existing code or how much new code they develop during a hackathon. Moreover, we aim to understand if and where that code gets reused, and what factors affect reuse. Method: We collected information about 22,183 hackathon projects from DEVPOST– a hackathon database – and obtained related code (blobs), authors, and project characteristics from the WORLD OF CODE. We investigated if code blobs in hackathon projects were created before, during, or after an event by identifying the original blob creation date and author, and also checked if the original author was a hackathon project member. We tracked code reuse by first identifying all commits containing blobs created during an event before determining all projects that contain those commits. Result: While only approximately 9.14% of the code blobs are created during hackathons, this amount is still significant considering time and member constraints of such events. Approximately a third of these code blobs get reused in other projects. The number of associated technologies and the number of participants in a project increase reuse probability. Conclusion: Our study demonstrates to what extent pre-existing code is used and new code is created during a hackathon and how much of it is reused elsewhere afterwards. Our findings help to better understand code reuse as a phenomenon and the role of hackathons in this context and can serve as a starting point for further studies in this area. 

Time-bounded events such as hackathons have become a global phenomenon. Scientific communities in particular show growing interest in organizing them to attract newcomers and develop technical artifacts to expand their code base. Current hackathon approaches presume that participants have sufficient expertise to work on projects on their own. They only provide occasional support by domain experts serving as mentors which might not be sufficient for newcomers. Drawing from work on workplace and educational mentoring, we developed and evaluated an approach where each hackathon team is supported by a community member who serves in a mentor role that goes beyond providing occasional support. Evaluating this approach, we found that teams who took ownership of their projects, set achievable goals early while building social ties with their mentor and receiving learning-oriented support reported positive perceptions related to their project and an increased interest in the scientific community that organized the hackathon. Our work thus contributes to our understanding of mentoring in hackathons, an area which has not been extensively studied. It also proposes a feasible approach for scientific communities to attract and integrate newcomers which is crucial for their long-term survival.