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Science is often a long-term endeavour, with research being conducted over months or years, but scientific hackathons turn this notion on its head by bringing participants together to come up with solutions for scientific problems in just three days.

Since hosting its first hackathon in January 2015, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has hosted over a dozen more, both at the National Institutes of Health’s main campus in Bethesda, MD, and at institutions around the United States. While each hackathon has tackled different research areas, their overall goal has been the same, rapid prototyping of open-source computational tools for addressing biomedical research problems.

Bringing participants together to come up with solutions for scientific problems in just three days.

Collaboration

Unlike competitive hackathons, in which teams strive to come up with a winning approach to a single problem, NCBI hackathons are more collaborative, with each team working on its own specific project or problem. Teams present their progress throughout the hackathon, getting feedback from other teams, and participants may switch teams when another group needs their particular expertise.

At the end of the hackathon, instead of having lots of different solutions of varying success to a single problem, as in a competitive hackathon, each team has hopefully created a functional tool that can be adopted by other users in the research community. Many teams will also complete a manuscript describing their process and outcomes within a few days of the end of the hackathon. Of course, not every team will be successful, as solving complex scientific problems in just three days can be a daunting task. Even so, participants on teams that don’t end up meeting their goal can still benefit from the chance to participate in a hackathon.

Each team has hopefully created a functional tool that can be adopted by other users in the research community.

A chance to network

Unlike competitive hackathons, in which participants form their own teams in advance, NCBI hackathons participants are assigned to teams based on their particular expertise and background. As a result, participants often have an opportunity to work with people from other disciplines, backgrounds, and levels of expertise, collaborating on teams with individuals they likely would not have met in their usual work.

Participants in past NCBI hackathons have ranged from undergraduate students to highly experienced researchers, with diverse backgrounds, from biologists to computer scientists to librarians. Thus, hackathons give participants a chance to network with and learn from a wide variety of others interested in scientific computing and research.

Hackathons give participants a chance to network with and learn from a wide variety of others interested in scientific computing and research.

Get involved

If you’re feeling inspired and are interested in participating in a hackathon, many opportunities exist to get involved. The NCBI Hackathons page provides a list of upcoming hackathons across the country, including an application for an upcoming hackathon at NIH in August 2017. Institutions and groups are also encouraged to host their own NCBI-style hackathons; a recent hackathon team started development of a manual for how to run a hackathon that can help with planning and organization.

Other hackathon organizers are invited to both use and contribute to this resource, as well as to submit papers describing their completed hackathon tools and projects to the F1000Research Hackathon Collection, which contains manuscripts from NCBI and other hackathons.