Hackathon Fever: Curing the Cancer of Convenience

-- By MadelineCameronWardleworth - 03 Feb 2018

Curious Bedfellows

What do South by Southwest, the UK’s Society for Computers and Law, and workplace equality thought leader Caren Ulrich Stacey have in common? At a minimum, a shared enthusiasm for hackathons. ‘Hackathon’ is a term in present day parlance, particularly in the dialects of its follower fraternities, like the US tech collective. The word is a portmanteau of ‘hack’ and ‘marathon,’ defined by Major League Hacking as an ‘invention marathon’. In recent years the concept and practice has been exported and taken up en masse as a collaborative, multidisciplinary site for brainstorming tech-based interventions to a raft of issues. Collaborative learning, building, and creation sharing characterize hackathons. The events are often hosted over a weekend in a relaxed and welcoming, community ambiance. Today, the barrier to participation entry is not a suite of programming qualifications. Any individual who has an interest in technology or the issue being hacked can attend. Take South by Southwest for example, the feted, trendy Texan festival. South by Southwest invites hackers, creators, makers, and coders to converge. Hackers compete in three hack categories, Music, Film, and VR/A, over 24 hours, to ‘push the boundaries of existing tech across entertainment media’. Ulrich Stacey, founder and CEO of DiversityLab? , led the 2015 Women in Law Hackathon to create new ideas to disrupt the stagnant dialogue vis-à-vis diversity in BigLaw? . Participants included Stanford Law students, partners from major global law firms, and diversity and leadership gurus. Even at the University of Chicago, there are hackathon competitions across disciplines to create projects in 24 or 48 hours.

Recent History

Hackathons have not always been as proximate as they are now to household name status. They first entered the tech stratosphere circa 1999, when companies such as Open BSD and Sun Microsystems held in-company hackathons. These localized, in-house events were more common at the outset. Hackathons then gained mainstream traction in 2013. Growing computing capabilities have changed the hackathon landscape and increased participants’ ability to progress solutions predicated on software, quite literally, overnight.

The Software Sausage Factory

The ingredients of commercial software, like sausages, are often out of sight and out of mind, problematically inaccessible to the consumer. This begs the question – is hackathon-produced software free? More precisely, do hackathons advocate for anarchist production and promote the development of software that has a positive relationship with freedom?

Conflict of Interest

I profess a stake in this subject. This month I am due to lead a mini-hackathon on improving literacy about women’s rights under international law, at the student-run, public interest Rebellious Lawyering Conference. In preparing for the session as a wet behind the ears, rights literacy enthusiast, I quickly realized that I had not considered the freedom implications of a hackathon session. Keen to avoid complicity in matters that can compromise democracy, I began to research free software hackathons. To my delight and relief, search engines soon revealed that great minds have ruminated over the relationship between the two. Better yet, they provide a how-to guide for the nervous organizer-to-be.

A Happy Marriage

Free software and hackathons make a handsome couple, as Richard Stallman describes:

[H]ackathons fit the spirit of a community in which people take an attitude of cooperation and respect towards each other. The software that accords with this spirit is free (libre) software, free as in freedom.

At their best, hackathons strengthen the spirit of sharing in attendees and communities. And accordingly hackathons make perfect sense within the free software frame. Contradistinctively, hackathons that do not engage with free software assault the community culture upon which they exist. So how, pray tell, does a novice organizer organize a pro-free software hackathon? For yours truly, a recent recruit to the free software sorority, this becomes an exercise in countering the convenience of not addressing the problem. Stallman assists. He counsels that hackathon developers must be expressly advised that 'you must agree to give the community the use of your project's results in freedom, if you ever consider them good enough to use or release.' Information regarding the GNU license regime should be provided. Moreover, a free software policy of the hackathon itself can be adopted. Hackathons should ask each participating project to pledge to follow this rule:

If you ever release or use this code or design, you will release its source code under a free (libre) license. If you distribute the code in executable form, you will make that free (libre) also.

Happily, these are not difficult steps to bake into the foundations of a hackathon event. They require very little of the organizer and can hardly be skirted out of perceived inconvenience.

The Head Fake

When we conceive of the hackathon’s net value add, we might first list the development of practical tools to respond to a pressing, complex problem. Multidisciplinary community building might be listed second. Hackathons serve an expressive function to boot, issuing a reverberating message to society writ large that this our Internet-based epoch and its tech gains offer more than merely facilitating the swift and cost effective delivery of takeaway pad Thai and or butter chicken. Critically, a free software hackathon offers an additional positive externality. A free software hackathon is a head fake, implicitly challenging today’s oppressive software development regime in a forum that ostensibly is working to achieve other objectives.

The popular appeal of the hackathon may one day ground a Trivial Pursuit question. Recalling Ulrich Stacey, and South by Southwest, a question we can conceive of might underscore the curious diversity in people and problems hackathons increasingly attract. A more exhilarating prospective Trivial Pursuit question is 'when did hackathons’ mandating of free software principles become standard practice?' The question in the immediacy therefore becomes how to encourage such a union.

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