The reason I don't like articles like these - although I actually agree with a lot of her points - is because the term "hackathon" now covers such a wide variety of events, and not all of them have the characteristics she describes.
For example,
> You can tell me all you like about how collaborative the atmosphere of your event is, but if you are awarding prizes for the “best X”, you just sound hypocritical. If you want me to believe the event is collaborative, don’t make it a competition.
I fully agree with this point and wish more hackathons didn't have judges and prizes. But some don't - I watched the presenting of a tech music hack weekend once, and there were no judges. They gave prizes out entirely at random - and there were some iPads, good prizes to! The atmosphere was great.
I've also been at hackathons that had great food that wasn't pizza, and hackathons where they encouraged ppl to leave at 6pm.
But I think we need to be careful not to tar all "hackathons" with one brush here. It's interesting that people are now using different words like "Hackstuff" from the article (another reason ppl use different words is that the word "hack" tends to put non tech people off massively) and I'm not sure where this leaves the usage and common accepted definition of "hackathon".
For example,
> You can tell me all you like about how collaborative the atmosphere of your event is, but if you are awarding prizes for the “best X”, you just sound hypocritical. If you want me to believe the event is collaborative, don’t make it a competition.
I fully agree with this point and wish more hackathons didn't have judges and prizes. But some don't - I watched the presenting of a tech music hack weekend once, and there were no judges. They gave prizes out entirely at random - and there were some iPads, good prizes to! The atmosphere was great.
I've also been at hackathons that had great food that wasn't pizza, and hackathons where they encouraged ppl to leave at 6pm.
But I think we need to be careful not to tar all "hackathons" with one brush here. It's interesting that people are now using different words like "Hackstuff" from the article (another reason ppl use different words is that the word "hack" tends to put non tech people off massively) and I'm not sure where this leaves the usage and common accepted definition of "hackathon".