Crowdsourced Software Development in Civic Apps - Motivations of Civic Hackathons Participants

摘要

Hackathons are intensive events that typically last from 1 to 3 days, where programmers and sometimes people with interdisciplinary backgrounds (e.g., designers, journalists, activists) collaborate to develop software applications to overcome a challenge proposed by the event organizers. Civic hackathons are a particular type of hackathon that gained momentum in the last years, mainly propelled by city halls and government agencies throughout the world as a way to explore public data repositories. These initiatives became an attempt to crowdsource the development of software applications targeting civic issues. Some articles in academic literature have conflicting arguments about factors that motivate developers to create such apps. Claims are mostly based on anecdotal evidence since research is still scarce in the empirical analysis of civic hackathons. Thus, we decided to do a study to gather data under the perspective of hackathon participants, focusing on what motivation factors make them join such competitions. We conducted a survey research where we intended to provide empirical evidence for a diverse audience (e.g., hackathon organizers, open data specialists) interested in civic hackathons as a form of software crowdsourcing. In this work, we present preliminary results.