#appril

Little research is involved in NaNoWriMo - authors don’t plan what they write, or how it will evolve. This lack of planning is celebrated, and organizers are incredibly proud of the month’s results.

Of the 1,000,000 + people who have participated over the last fourteen years, about 100 have been published by large or small publishing houses. Setting aside the debate of whether recognition from a publishing house is worth anything, or whether the satisfaction of having put 50,000 words on paper over the course of a month is prize enough, that’s an incredibly low success rate. Of the 300,000 registered participants in 2012, only 30,000 or so actually completed their novels - a 10% success rate. I’m not saying this to belittle NaNoWriMo, I just want to highlight how incredibly hard it is to write a book.

I’ve participated in month long “album making” marathons, with the goal to compose a series of songs that lasted about 30 minutes. An urban legend - after a little research, it turned out to not be true - tells of my favorite musician recording a song on a cassette, working on it for two days, and if it hadn’t gotten anywhere: tossing it.

Because a modern lifestyle can be incredibly devoid of creativity, we’re tapping into our innovativeness in extreme ways. We put ourselves in extraordinary situations to produce something we wouldn’t under normal circumstances.

The word hackathon has nothing to do with writing books or making music, but it is a kindred spirit. For the uninitiated: a hackathon let a group of people who like programming get together and build a piece of software/hardware/wearware from scratch. Because of the popularity of these all-night events amongst web and mobile developers - and because a large focus of the commercial and business world is on web and mobile development - the most popular product of a hackathon is usually a website that will solve some problem the developers have.

Note: I have taken part in hackathons, and because web development is what I do, I am very guilty of keeping myself busy with problems that I, as a 20-something white male, have. I am trying to change that.

Hackathons have become so popular that companies now advertise that they host them on their job listings, developers show off what they built in them when applying to jobs, some of the products built get venture funding, and companies have been springing up where that’s all employees do - 100% time. It’s becoming a playing field of millions of dollars1, and “winning” can launch you into TechCrunch superstardom.

This intense focus to solve problems within tech has spread to other fields - social services now call on young people to come up with ways to solve public issues in their country2, or solving problems within their company3, and its culture.

Is there a Problem?

Here’s a short list of things that have come out of some of the most public hackathons this year:

The last winner of LAUNCH Hackathon was WizzyWig, a codeless website editor.

TechCrunch SF Disrupt 2013 produced a reading comprehension tool called Spruce, a way to store encrypted files online called Cloudiserve, and AdFree - a way to make money from your site without having to sell user data.

The actual list is endless, and the winners of these hackathons often do build technically impressive tools, but I have yet to see something truly impressive that stands on its own, and isn’t just “really cool”.

The allotted time is too short to produce anything meaningful. 48 hours works better for bringing teams together, presenting, introducing people to new problems, and brainstorming about interesting issues rather than trying to actually solve anything. Often the product of the past one or two days is just a hack. And the quality of this hack is not helped by the stay-up-all-night culture celebrated at these events.

Getting into hackathons is also getting harder. Venues are limited in size, and several of the popular events now screen each applicant for their contributions to public software - often largely through their Github accounts. Never mind that a majority of programmers and engineers don’t contribute to open source, and would probably like access to hackathons as a way of getting involved in such projects4. This exclusiveness is in odd contrast with the original premise of “anyone can build something if they just do it”. In a perverse way - what started out as a way for open source developers to contribute to open source software now requires having worked on open source software to be allowed to build things for for-profit companies.

Hackathons encourage people to work on what they want to work on, but increasingly, the participants aren’t trying something new or creative. They want a spot on the winners list. This perpetuates an exclusive mindset that not just anyone can take a part in, so that even people who come to a hackathon without any immediately relevant skills to contribute don’t get help or attention even if they might have the hardest problem in the room.

Sure, by just selecting the best you’ll get impressive products, but you’re not selecting the people with the most diverse backgrounds - just those with enough time on their hands to contribute to OSS. So what you’ll build will be impressive and scratch an itch, but you’re not looking for, and fixing, real problems. Hackathons don’t make space for research, and research - if you don’t have relevant life experience - is what makes a solution worthwhile.

What’s wrong with these marathons, then, is that they often apply solutions to problems that a) aren’t real problems, or b) require a lot of thought and effort to be solved properly. An easy fix suggested and built within two days is not going to cut it, and as a result, anything a hackathon produces and pretends to be more than a hack, will not be optimal.

It’s a celebration of shallow solutions to shallow problems, the result of our age’s ever shorter attention spans5.

What’s Good About Hackathons

Of course, there are plenty of things to celebrate. Hackathons have the ability to bring people together who would likely not have met. People who have a clever idea get to meet the people who can execute that idea. The inclusivity of hackathons is something to be cherished, not avoided.

Likewise, the people attending will get introduced to how certain technologies work. Putting people with different ideas and from different backgrounds in a room to build something will lead to clashing ideologies, mindsets, and mentalities. This is great. You want this.

Going to just one hackathon will make you realize how much you can get done if you put your mind to it. For those two days you’ll be focused on being productive, and not busy (until you get sleep deprived, at which point you’ll just be useless). You’ll realize that when you go home at the end of the weekend you can call up some friends and you can start actually planning something. And it doesn’t have to be built by 9 AM tomorrow morning. You can go to work, and you can start influencing how your organization does things.

In this way, hackathons encourage you to adapt a new attitude and mentality about work, and that’s something to be cherished.

And finally, hackathons can be a lot of fun. If you go into one hoping to learn something, and maybe building something absurd, or taking some time to plan and organize a personal project and get input from others, you’ll learn. A lot.

So, What About NaNoWriMo?

I started this essay writing about NaNoWriMo as a parallel to hackathons. The two concepts rose to popularity at approximately the same time (late nineties through the 2000s), and their existence as a celebration of unplanned doing is probably linked to the rise of the Internet as a social and intellectual tool.

NaNoWriMo is doing something right. They have a group of fans who do it every year and - alongside a staff of people who organize the event - they help newbies get started and stay motivated. They have a community that talks to each other, and supports each other. You can write about anything, and any subject is fair game. The goal is ambitious enough to challenge people, and * absolutely anyone* can take a part. You don’t even need a Internet connection, or a computer.

Because a novel is a real thing, with a concrete goal and deadline, people get to realize how much hard work writing one is, and how much planning professional authors put into their work. Sure, anyone can be an author, but what separates you from being Neil Gaiman or Stephen King is that they write. A lot. People who start writing their novels for NaNoWriMo are under no serious illusion that their book will be published. They do it because they want to challenge themselves.

Hackathons, especially commercially driven ones, should look to this these aspects for encouraging anyone to take part.

Next Steps

The invasion of hack marathons by money-for-money interests was inevitable. These interests have capital, and gift prizes are going to attract more people. But given that the services available at a no-money hackathon are the same as those at a for-money one, and the money is just the prize, or the option to turn your venture into a business, maybe it’s up to people attending them to do them for their own, or their community’s, sake.

Let’s start by making sure that any events that are organized are inclusive, and attract people who have problems to solve from various fields. Making a better website building tool is not a Problem, it’s an itch. Let’s invite other industries to our events, and let’s learn something from them.

Hackathons can be a lot of fun. There’s some truly clever things that I have seen that had no purpose at all. Sometimes it’s just enough to learn something new. But money has removed the Let’s Make Mistakes factor from hackathons. To get investors you have to have the best project that investors could see a value in. You have to be the most visible programmer on Github to even get in.

Before you start, talk to the people who don’t know how to program. See what problems they’re trying to fix. Chances are they don’t know how legitimate their experiences and knowledge is, simply because society has continually told them so6. Some groups, like Code For America, are doing this. And in the past years I’ve attended hackathons that helped charity organizations improve their services for free7.

What separates the creative people from those that aren’t, is that they spend a lot of time being creative, and hackathons are a great way of realizing that you can be a creative programmer. NaNoWriMo provides authors with a community of authors. Hackathons should provide people with a community of hackers that they can turn to.

Taking the next step, here's a brilliant article about designing for social good over at model view culture: It's Not You, It's the System.

Octobuild

I’ve done a fair bit of thinking about how hackathons could, or should, be more like NaNoWriMo. What started out as Appril fell through because of a persistent naysayer8, and while I tried to do some things in Octobuild, my own life schedule didn’t quite work out. I would love to build a community of hackers who get together to solve big problems that they can’t do outside of their day job. In part, it’s what Idea Otter9 set out to do, but it evolved into something much simpler than that. If you’re interested in something similar, definitely reach out.

Final Thought

I’m definitely interested in how Internet bite-size culture is starting to affect the way we work. Facts are readily available, so we use them, but do we think about what they mean? While working I often use Google as my memory, and it definitely affects the way I write, program, or think. I have to force myself to not work in mini-hackathons. To take a break and come back to a problem, instead of implementing a hack.

Slashdot Interview with Jason Calacanis ↩

Code For America ↩

LinkedIn: Work On Company Culture ↩

Let’s not even get into the amount of privilege you must have to be able to take a weekend off of doing anything and dedicate it to something like this. This immediately disgards people who have kids and can’t put them in daycare (single mothers or fathers), people who work during the weekend (restaurant workers, transit workers, factory workers, cleaning crews), people who can’t reach your event because public transport isn’t running, etc. And then there’s the technology the solutions require that you have access to. As a bonus, here’s some reading on the hacker culture’s beloved “Meritocracy” (http://www.garann.com/dev/2012/you-keep-using-that-word/)[You Keep Using That Word] ↩

You could write a book about this. Luckily for all of us, it’s already been done. Nicholas Carr - The Shallows: How the Internet is Doing To Our Brains ↩

The Atlantic - The Myth of “I’m Bad At Math” ↩

And even here, the final product suffered immensely from the lack of research. ↩

Being Myself On The Internet ↩