A Typology of Hackathon-use

Abstract

This paper addresses the typology of the hackathon concept. Specifically, it focuses on describing the four archetypes of hackathon use: 'designing', 'crowdsourcing', 'learning' and 'community building' discovered from the literature. The typology is a continuation of the conceptualization of hackathon, which aims to clarify the concept of hackathons and their use in various contexts. As a result, the paper describes the characteristics that typify the hackathon, 'body of participants', 'focal interest', 'setting' and 'creation method'. The two main themes that arose from the studied literature, 'body of participants' and 'focal interest', are used as the axis to compose a 2x2 matrix of the archetypes. Therefore, this paper contributes to the conceptual clarity of the hackathon phenomenon. As the main result, this proposed paper fills a prominent research gap in hackathon literature: the typology of the hackathon-use. Thus, this paper reports the typology by differentiating known archetypes of the hackathon.