Next weekend the sponsor AngleHack and two student groups at UCLA are throwing a huge hackathon. LAHacks will bring together students and alumni from Southern California’s premier technical schools in hopes of fostering a more cohesive start-up community. It seems that So Cal is struggling to create the same kind of start-up magic that Boston, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay area have achieved.
Hackathons are becoming more popular and are a Scrum Pattern for good reason. First, they bring people together in a creative and voluntary environment. This encourages people to bond over activities of their choice, helping team members to form stable relationships, which can lead to better team performance and collaboration.
Second, they produce interesting results. Facebook has been throwing hackathons since 2007. These all-night coding sessions have produced many valuable features for the social media giant including the Like Button, Timeline and Chat.
Third, if used strategically, Hackathons can slow development down a bit, allowing the organization to deal with constraints in other divisions.
But most importantly, they help developers merge their personal interests with their company’s financial interest. Hackathons give workers the opportunity to have a meaningful relationship with their employer by giving them the autonomy to master features and products that they enjoy while creating value for their company. Research shows again and again that mastery, autonomy and contributing to a community motivates people much more than higher salaries. Hackathons allow workers to help their company and colleagues, plus they aid in recruiting and retaining a motivated workforce.
Scrum Inc. recommends that companies throw hackathons regularly to free people up to be more creative and interactive. The value of hackathons is hard to quantify but one quick look at Google, which allows their employees to work on personal projects 20% of the time shows that when a company emphasizes creativity, awesome things happen.
-- Joel Riddle
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