Nowadays, there is debate about which type of hackathon should be taken into account by professionals in technology, if there is a unique concept of hackathon, and even what it means to “win” a hackathon. In this essay, we are going to explore these themes through John Rawls’s liberal lens.
Hackathon. When the value is far from the podium.
As we all know, a hackathon is a gathering of programmers where the main goal is to collaboratively develop software while working continuously for a finite and usually short amount of time. The duration might be one day, two days, or one week. This term is closely related to “marathon”, a long-distance running event with a distance of approximately 42 kilometres; one of the most popular, and original, competitions of the Olympic Games. Outside of the Olympics, marathons are held in many cities around the world, some with the goal of commemorating a date, helping a nonprofit organization, or solely for the love of the sport. Whatever the event, if you’re participating in the Olympic games or running Maráton de Santiago, to reach the podium of a marathon is cause for praise, recognition, and pride. On the other hand, the fact of finishing a marathon, hanging out with your friends, getting along with the other competitors of the race, supporting those who could not find strength to keep going, feeling the support and hearing the cheers from the public when you get the finish line is enough and that is what makes some people travel all around the world in search of the next marathon. Maybe this makes you think of the myth that is the origin of the contest, where Pheidippides, a Greek messenger, runs from Marathon to Athens to let the people know that the Persian army was defeated, waiting for no glory and dying after achieving his goal.
From Marathon to Business-A-Thon. Moral arbitrariness when choosing a winner.
Similar to marathons, hackathons are long and intensive contests. They challenge your software development skills and creativity, so the prefix “hack,” which is used for a sense of experimental or exploratory programming, is appropriate for the unconventional ways and new perspectives that are seen as requirements of hackathons. The characteristic most valued in a hackathon is innovation: making a new idea possible in a short amount of time and making it real, meaning that from the engineering point of view, the demo of the idea could be shown and tested. Similar to marathons, what is really important is to finish, to complete the application, make a demonstration, meet other developers, help your peers trapped in error, test a new tool that you couldn’t try over the past week, or simply experience the excitement of creating something.
In the first years of hackathon organization, all of them were just like that: a bunch of people gathered in a place to “hack” a specific problem and try to solve it. Soon, some people with different interests realized that billion-dollar business ideas could arise from these events, and it was in that moment when another type of hackathon, that lives on to this day, was born. It is the Business-A-Thon. There you have a judging panel, that after watching a 5-minute (or less) presentation or “pitch”, choose three or less “winners”.
Many factors contribute to winning a marathon, but unlike the those, these new hackathons have a jury that decides which team/project loses or wins. Now, the moment of truth in a hackathon is not when you prove that the idea is possible to develop in a small amount of time, but when The Panel, like a some sort of technology oracles (whose criteria is slanted and questionable as it relates to engineering), deliberates between each other to define which idea has good opportunities in the market by evaluating a team or an idea based on a 5-minute pitch (in an event that has a 48-hour minimum) given by one person (in a team formed by 3 or more people). Similar to how some marathons stopped being about running and became about one’s appearance, hackathons stopped being about creation and more about business.
Introducing John Rawls and Veil of Ignorance.
John Borden (Bordley) Rawls, was an American philosopher, philosophy professor at Harvard University, and the author of many books including his magnum opus A Theory of Justice. He is widely considered one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, and is widely recognized for his contributions to liberal political philosophy.
In A Theory of Justice, Rawls describes what he believes the principles of justice are through the use of an artificially deliberated resource which he calls the original position, from which one can decide what those principles are behind a veil of ignorance. This “veil” serves to blind the audience of all facts about themselves that could cloud the notion of justice they will develop. Indeed,
“…no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of life, or even the special features of psychology such as his aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism. More than this, I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.”
According to Rawls, then, the ignorance of these details about yourself leads to principles that are fair to all, in general and in short, the fact of having privileges or disadvantages is a matter of chance and luck. Although many may disagree, it is difficult to refute this theory in which no one truly deserves the real achievements they may have in life while putting your skills into practice.:
“The initial distribution of assets for any period of time is strongly influenced by natural and social contingencies. The existing distribution of income and wealth, say, is the cumulative effect of prior distributions of natural assets — that is, natural talents and abilities — as these have been developed or left unrealized, and their use favored or disfavored over time by social circumstances and such chance contingencies as accident and good fortune. Intuitively, the most obvious injustice of the system of natural liberty is that it permits distributive shares to be improperly influenced by these factors so arbitrary from a moral point of view.”
So could it be then that winning a hackathon is simply a matter of luck? Apparently, it’s not simply a question of technical skills to develop an idea and show a prototype. It is our ability to convey the idea, our sympathy, grace, and selling skills that will likely influence the exhibitor along with the empathy the exhibitor may have with the jury. Most of the time everything boils down to a marketing activity regardless of if the prototype works, which is where the meaning and significance of a hackathon lies, rather than only a “plan” of an idea. Taking the words of Rawls, such decisions are being improperly influenced by factors that, from the moral point of view, are arbitrary at the time the jury picks a “winner.”
Hackathon or Business-A-Thon. Rethink the competition and keep competing.
Rawls describes the veil of ignorance in order to define fair laws. This veil could apply to how judging panels choose winning ideas/projects if we define a hackathon as the society in which the law system is designed. Then, you can suppose, using the concept of a hackathon, that the main goal is innovation through tangible evidence where the possible business and revenue is not important. Using this assumption, placing the decision of the most innovative project in the hands of a separately selected group doesn’t seem like best thing to do. Therefore, the first proposed change is to not have a jury. The idea is that every team has the chance to present their solution, like a regular hackathon (with a pitch), and at the end of the event organise a voting process where the electors are the as same participants. The second proposed change is to not have a podium, derived from the diatribe that if somebody really deserves to win recognition or not in a contest is in this case, a competition. If you decide to have prizes, there should be an amount of prizes equal to the number of teams. Instead of assigning them depending on the position, supposedly in order of importance, what the first team will win is the opportunity to choose the prize for their team, and the second team will choose from the rest of the prizes, and so on and so forth. The only restriction in the contest is that any individual can vote for any team except for the one in which he/she belongs. Thus several premises are secured. The decision of the best team or idea is practically irrelevant, because what you want is to present your idea to your peers. In addition, no team would be out of the list and the solutions in the first places will only be in a better position among the status quo of said competition, which doesn’t necessarily mean they are better than anyone else’s ideas.
The goal of this article is not to criticize Business-A-Thons, nor its organizers, nor its juries. It is a critic of the marketing of such events, that although you claim you are looking for the most innovative project, in reality, what you are looking for is a safe business, a model that from the beginning would be profitable at least in a defined environment. The idea of this article is to propose a change in the promotion of these Business-A-Thons and even a new format of hackathon. And finally, to show an empirical, and even philosophical, perspective for programmers, engineers, and technology enthusiasts on the participation in any competition, with one goal in mind, to stop thinking about Business-A-Thons as the way to innovate or even to succeed with a new idea and have fun in the way, and more where you go to create the next copy of an existing “secure” model business.
We, in Axiom Zen Chile’s branch, are implementing some of these ideas, like not having a jury nor assigning prizes by position, in a hackathon called “API Fest Santiago” (May 2015).
Sources:
- A Theory of Justice
- The Moral Foundations of Politics
- Ask HN: The rising “Hackathon Hackers” culture
- Three Types of Harmful Hackathons (discussion)
- Hack-and-Tell
- Show HN: Projects from “Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas” Hackathon (website)
Spanish version:
