A survey instrument for hackathon organizers and researchers

This template contains a collection of measures to assess the perception of hackathon participants after an event has ended. The measures included in this template cover individual aspects such as a participant's motivation to participate, prior hackathon experience, programming experience, and demographics. They also cover team aspects such as a participant's perception of the team composition, the team process, and the team’s project. In addition, the template contains measures related to a participant's perception of the community that organized the event and the hackathon itself.

The measures included in the template are based on previously validated scales. The respective sources are referenced next to each scale. We do not suggest using all measures contained in this template for each event. In fact, measures are often only suitable for hackathons that focus on specific goals (e.g., programming experience might only be relevant for a programming-related event). Moreover, there are also measures that assess very similar aspects of an event but in a slightly different way (e.g., the participant’s overall satisfaction with an event and their intentions to participate in a similar event again in the future). We thus encourage whoever uses this template to create a survey that fits their specific needs. This includes adding scales that might be important for a specific event and removing scales that are not perceived to be relevant. However, when adapting the survey, please make sure to keep the scales intact. Altering them might compromise their integrity. In addition, we would also suggest including items that are marked with a hash (#) in every hackathon survey. We found these helpful for most, if not all, hackathon events.

If you utilize this instrument to study an event, we would appreciate it if you would be willing to share anonymized responses with us. Please contact the main author for further details.