Types of hackathons[edit]
Some hackathons focus on a particular platform such as mobile apps, a desktop operating system, web development or video game development.
Mobile app hackathons like Over the Air, held at Phoenix Park, Ireland, can see a large amount of corporate sponsorship and interest.[7][8]
Music Hack Day, a hackathon for music-related software and hardware applications, is a popular event, having been held over 30 times around the world since 2009.[9] Also Music Tech Fest, a three-day interdisciplinary festival for music ideas bringing together musicians with hackers, researchers and industry, features a hackathon.[10] Similarly, Science Hack Day, a hackathon for making things with science, has been held over 45 times in over 15 countries around the world since 2010.[11]
Hackathons have been held to develop applications that run on various mobile device operating systems, such as Android,[12] iOS[13] and MeeGo.[14] Hackathons have also been held to develop video-based applications and computer games.[15] Hackathons where video games are developed are sometimes called game jams.
"TV Hackfest" events have been held in both London[16] and San Francisco,[17] focusing mainly on social television and second screen technologies. In TV Hackfests, challenge briefs are typically submitted by content producers and brands, in the form of broadcast industry metadata or video content, while sponsors supply APIs, SDKs and pre-existing open source software code.[18]
Hackathons have also been used in the life sciences to advance the informatics infrastructure that supports research. The Open Bioinformatics Foundation ran two hackathons for its member projects in 2002 and 2003, and since 2010 has held 2-day "codefests" preceding its annual conference.[19] The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center has co-organized and sponsored hackathons for evolutionary bioinformatics since 2006.[20][21] BioHackathon[22] is an annual event that started in 2008 targeted at advancing standards to enable interoperable bioinformatics tools and Web services. Neuroscientists have also used hackathons to bring developers and scientists together to address issues that range from focusing on a specific information system (e.g., Neurosynth Hackathon[23] and the Allen Brain Atlas Hackathon[24]) and providing reserved time for broad scientific inquiry (e.g., Brainhack),[25][26] to using specific challenges that focus hacking activity (e.g., HBM Hackathon).[27]
There has been an emergence of 'datathons' or data-focused hackathons in recent years.[28][29][30] These events challenge data scientists working with others attending to together use creativity and data analysis skills and platforms to build, test and explore solutions and dashboards which analyse huge datasets in a limited amount of time. These are increasingly being used to deliver insights in big public and private datasets in various disciplines including business,[31] health care[32][33] news media[34] and for social causes.[35]