What Happens to All These Hackathon Projects?: Identifying Factors to Promote Hackathon Project Continuation

Time-based events, such as hackathons and codefests, have become a global phenomenon attracting thousands of participants to hundreds of events every year. While research on hackathons has grown considerably, there is still limited insight into what happens to hackathon projects after the event itself has ended. While case studies have provided rich descriptions of hackathons and their aftermath, we add to this literature a large-scale quantitative study of continuation across hackathons in a variety of domains. Our findings indicate that a considerable number of projects get continued after a hackathon has ended. Our results also suggest that short-and long-term continuation are different phenomena. While short-term continuation is associated with technical preparation, number of technologies used in a project and winning a hackathon, long-term continuation is predicated on skill diversity among team members, their technical capabilities in relationship to the technologies and their intention to expand the reach of a project. Moreover, we found intensive short-term activity to be associated with a lower likelihood of long-term project continuation.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.