Going Beyond The Challenge!: Investigating The Aspects That Attract People to Participate in Hackathons

Hackathons are events where their participants face the challenge of working intensively and collaboratively with other people. In these events, the participants have the opportunity to develop functional prototypes and solutions to real problems in a short time period (one to three days). Those kind of events have become increasingly popular and spread to several fields of knowledge. Also, they have been adopted by many organizations over the world. However, there is little scientific data that explains why people have participated in hackathons. In this paper, we report findings from an exploratory study in two hackathons organized by a big IT company. We aim to understand why their participants have voluntarily participated in such events. We identified four sets of motivational factors: technical, social, individual and business motivations. Technical motivations are associated with skill acquisition, while social motivations are related to the interaction between people during the event. Also, individual motivations are associated with a sense of autonomy and enjoyment of work. Finally, business motivations include the opportunity of publicizing work and the possibility of establishing partnerships. Our findings contributes to a broader understanding of the motivations for participating in hackathons, as well as providing recommendations for the organization of such events.