What does Strata Conference, Government Big Data Conference, GDC 2013, the HTML5 Developer Conference and Comic-Con San Diego have in common? None of those conferences are hosting Hackathons. Even those who seem to be naturally fitted to host one, like Big Data Conferences, are denying themselves the benefits of enabling developers to hack a new spawn of innovative applications to tackle some of the most important problems in the most innovative ways.
I mailed one organizer of a Big Data conference about the chances of the event to host a Hackathon, the answer was not only negative but almost condescending, I felt a little as Guybrush Threepwood, asking whoever gets in front to host a Hackathon. To be honest I’ve been salivating about a Big Data Hackathon for a long while.
Thinking about this post I started looking for some numbers about the benefits of attending or organizing such an event, or about what’s the fate of winners after they go home with their prizes, what kind of traction do they have? How many of them launch? Are VC’s paying attention in a similar way they do to accelerator programs? Most of those questions remain unanswered, I tried looking for the names of winners applications in places like CrunchBase or just plain Google and the results are average, i.e. around 25% of the winners of competences like AngelHack or TechCrunch Disrupt Hackaton are still alive and became companies, even though most of them doesn’t seem to have much traction. For smaller non-recurrent hackathons the available information can’t be considered more than anecdotical. Of course all this is in no way conclusive, many apps may have changed names or spinned, also some of them that seem to be alive may not be still in business, my research stopped at the website, I didn’t try to contact the companies for information. Also there’s little information about those teams that didn’t win but kept pushing for their hacks and eventually became companies.
From the sponsors perspective, it’d be nice to know if the adoption and use of their API’s or services have improved, or if it have helped its brand awareness, to see if they are getting any bang for their bucks. I contacted a couple of sponsors from events I attended but I only came to the conclusion that they’re not paying much attention to the ROI of Hackathons, one of them even gave the impression that they basically treat that investment the same way they treat charities, though it wasn’t clear if it was a philosophical statement or if they actually reflect it like that on the books. One particularly interesting fact is that a number of sponsors are companies that came from Hackathons themselves.
At last, it seems that hackathon skepticism was justified in the Big Data conference organizer, and that my enthusiasm is (for now) sustained only by the awesome experience it’s to attend one, I’m pretty sure that if they could find a way for a hackathon to make sense for them all Comic-cons would have one. This doesn’t means that conferences should stop hosting as many hackathons as possible, even though there’s not enough pieces of information about the dynamics of Hackathonomics.
Wholeonomics 