ICTworks

Not a week goes by without an invitation to participate in a hackathon, or the announcement of yet another app contest. Yet, what is the actual impact of either? After a long debate on Facebook, I still see both are often used as ways to:

• “Motivate community” – which means counting heads and claim that attendance equals either popularity or impact, or
• “Find innovation” – which means free labor for R&D for ideas to steal or sell or to award a $5k prize and forget about it the next day.

And sadly, the latter is the usual result of both. Hackathons and app contests are announced with great fanfare, much effort is put into marketing both as amazing 1-off events, and then the day after… crickets. Not a sustained outcome to be found besides rightly justified satire.

The Good

Now that’s not to say that all hackathons and app contests are useless. As Siobhan Green says, hackathons can be good for team building and marketing, and great professional development for the participants. Yet she is still selective about which ones her company attends.

Kate Chapman and her friends participated in a Random Hacks of Kindness and built a prototype of what is now known as the OpenStreetMap Tasking Manager. The hackathon prototypes lead to a solid requirements document, funding to build the final product, and a forthcoming version two of the software.

The Bad

Besides the often-random episodic nature of both, the participants are self-selecting. Like Siobhan says, its basically people with a lot of free time to spend on extraneous activities, like students, and rarely the high-level professionals who can translate ideas into strong finished products. And forget attracting parents of young kids or anyone with a hyper-busy travel schedule to a weekend event.

Sadly, hackathons are notoriously unattractive to women in general, which results in skewed gender biases in the final product that go unseen, much less addressed, throughout the ideation and development processes.

The Ugly

While I just touched on it above, the real ugly of both events is intellectual property ownership. Any event where the event organizer exerts ownership of the end product is evil, regardless of outcome of the hackathon or app contest. Sadly, app contest rules are rife with terms and conditions that allow the event organizer to use, appropriate, and resell any ideas or software submitted in any way they see fit, without recourse for the developer.

Hackathons are usually slightly better, if only because there isn’t usually a formal software submission process at the end of the event. However, hackathons can create the perception that all anyone needs to do to solve a major humanitarian issue is to volunteer to crunch code for a weekend. That impression can be the most corrosive of all.

Models We Should Follow

As mentioned above, Random Acts of Kindness are often well run events with a tight focus and expectation of follow on by everyone involved. Crisismappers also does good hackathons, with Jerri Husch noting that much was learned and designed by good people and great tech emerged.

One of my favorite models is the State Department’s TechCamp. While not a hackathon itself, they bring together developers and civil society organizations to think through problems that technology could solve. Some of projects, ideas, and solutions that emerge from the two days of brainstorming feed into a hackathon to create viable software, like in the Philippines and Moldova.

Toni Eliasz points us to Guiding Ideas from Mind to Market, a new report from infoDev at the World Bank, that found well structured, multi-faceted approaches with follow-up support are the key elements of a good app contest.

And that is the model we should follow. Inclusive hackathons and app contest focused on pre-defined problems to develop Open Source solutions that organizations will be (not “might be” or “could be”) investing in afterwards for long-term impact.