2023-04-24 04:00:19
Un event “nor sinks” launched in 2016 by the City of Paris bringing together 400 people to imagine ways to fight against terrorism; another, in February, at the Transport Innovation Agency, to reflect on the “single transport ticket” of tomorrow, under the aegis of the government; a last, in February, in Toulouse, where students are invited to invent “green aviation”. In major IT or business schools, administrations, non-profit associations, internally in certain large companies (BNP Paribas, SNCF, Axa, etc.), this strange word has been swarming for ten years, when it is necessary to find a solution to a problem.
If the runner has his marathon, the drinker his barathon, Nefertiti his Akhenaton… the developer has his hackathon. This portmanteau word refers to running born in Greece, and to the “hacker” culture, born in the infancy of computing. The first hackathons take place at the very beginning of the 21ste century.
Originally, these were innovation competitions, bringing together developers wishing to carry out a joint computer programming project. At Facebook, which was one of the first fans of confrontations (non-violent, let’s be clear) between its own employees, a hackathon gave birth to the “I like” button [Like] » .
A voluntary servitude
So let’s attack the hackathon. If the marathon is a long-distance race, it is advisable here to go quickly: the very short time is part of the game, and you have to obtain a result. Most of the time, forty-eight hours does the trick. Each team, relatively small, designs and then experiments with its solution, until obtaining a prototype of a mobile application, for example. In the end, it’s white smoke: the winning project is rewarded.
Confined to the middle of code and free software, the hackathon quickly went astray, becoming more of a role-playing game, an experience « fun ». We imagine all this little phosphorescent world cheerfully, animated by bursts of collective intelligence. “Everything becomes a hackathonbelieves comedian Karim Duval, who devotes a chapter to it in his Little Precis of culture bullshit (Le Robert, 224 pages, 13.40 euros) : brainstorming, business seminar, support group, giant mölkky, caterpillar…” In a way, any meeting can become a hackathon, except this time all participants feel involved and stay awake.
Because the experience is social: it is an opportunity for participants in solitary or radically different professions to meet, and keep a nice memory of this weekend without sleep or sun. The hackathons are also an opportunity for the organizing companies to promote their “employer brand”, to give a young image, and to identify potential talent, by inviting students, start-ups or simply curious people.
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