Hackathon

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Group photo from the Wikimedia Hackathon in Berlin 2011

A hackathon (word creation from “ hack ” and “ marathon ”) is a collaborative software and hardware development event. Alternative names are "Hack Day", "Hackfest" and "codefest". The aim of a hackathon is to jointly produce useful, creative or entertaining software products or, more generally, to find solutions to given problems within the duration of this event. The participants in software hackathons usually come from different areas of the software or hardware industry and often work on their projects in cross-functional teams. Hackathons always have a specific topic or are technology-related.

Origin and history

The word creation hackathon has been in use since 1999 at the latest, when events with this title took place in the context of OpenBSD on the one hand and Sun Microsystems on the other.

In the OpenBSD environment, the term was used for a developer meeting in Calgary, Canada in June 1999. In the case of Sun, a hackathon took place at the JavaOne conference in June 1999, which was dedicated to the Palm V.

From the mid-2000s, hackathons were recognized by the software industry and private investors in the USA as a method to quickly implement new ideas in software or to refine unclear product ideas with the prototypes that were created.

Some projects that were created as part of hackathons developed into their own startups . This includes , for example, GroupMe , which started at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 conference and was bought by Skype in 2011 for $ 85 million.

In addition to the software environment, hackathons are also organized more generally in order to find collaborative solutions to problems and tasks in a specific subject area, for example as part of a “Science Hack Day”.

procedure

Results presentation at Yahoo! Internal Hack Day Event at Yahoo! HQ (Sunnyvale, CA, USA) June 6th, 2006

A hackathon often starts with one or more lectures on the topic of the hackathon. Subsequently, topic proposals and ideas for projects are collected and teams are formed. These are self-organized according to interests and skills and are ideally cross-functional, i.e. H. People with different skills work together.

After the teams have been formed, the actual work phase takes place. This can last from a few hours to several days. For multi-day events, it's not uncommon for attendees to sleep and eat at the venue.

At the end of the event, the teams present their results. There are hackathons that select a winning project by a jury and award prizes. In some cases, the prizes can be substantial amounts of money. For example, at a “Social Gaming Hackathon” at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, the winner was awarded prize money of $ 250,000.

Examples of hackathons with free content

  • Youth chops
  • Coding da Vinci
  • Science Hack Day Berlin
  • Wikimedia Hackathon 2015
  • Open Energy Data Hackdays
  • Open Cultural Data Hackathon Switzerland 2015
  • Artificial intelligence of self-driving cars Hackathon Moscow 2017 ( Olga Anatoljewna Uskowa , Cognitive Technologies )
  • Mechatronics Hackathon FH Technikum Wien (December 14-16, 2018)
  • #WirVsVirus Hackathon of the Federal Government (March 20-22, 2020)
  • #EUvsVirus Hackathon of the European Commission (April 24-26, 2020)
  • Code4Green Hackathon by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety

Web links

Wiktionary: Hackathon  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. JavaOne's Palm-sized winner . JavaWorld. August 1, 1999. Retrieved February 20, 2015.
  2. a b c The Hackathon Is On: Pitching and Programming the Next Killer App , Steven Leckart, Wired , March 2012
  3. Hackday. In: Portal Wissenschaftskommunikation.de. Science in Dialogue , accessed on October 6, 2018 .
  4. Студенты МГУ победили на международном хакатоне по искусственному интеллекту . In: Tass . September 16, 2017 ( [1] [accessed July 12, 2020]).
  5. Federal government wants to implement hackathon ideas. In: N-tv . March 22, 2020, accessed April 9, 2020 .
  6. Lisa Hegemann: The corona hacks are here. In: ZEIT ONLINE . March 31, 2020, accessed April 9, 2020 .
  7. "led by the European Innovation Council and in close collaboration with the EU member states" | euvsvirus.org
  8. Code4Green: European environmental data hackathon. Retrieved July 11, 2020 .