Preliminary Findings on Software Engineering Practices in Civic Hackathons

Abstract

Civic hackathons gained momentum in the last years, mainly propelled by city halls and government agencies as a way to explore public data repositories. These initiatives became an attempt to crowdsource the development of software applications targeting government transparency and urban life, under the smart cities umbrella. Some authors have been criticizing the results of these competitions, complaining about the usefulness and quality of the software that is produced. However, academic literature has much anecdotal evidence on that, being scarce on empirical analysis of civic hackathons. Therefore, we intended to gather preliminary data not only to help verifying those claims but also to understand how teams in these competitions are tackling the different activities in their software development process, from requirements to application release and maintenance. In this work, we present preliminary results of these findings.