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Hackathons and similar time-bounded events have become a global phenomenon. Their proliferation in various domains and their usefulness for a variety of goals has subsequently led to the emergence of different formats. While there are a multitude of guidelines available on how to prepare and run a hackathon, most of them focus on a particular format that was created for a specific purpose within a domain for a certain type of participants. This makes it difficult in particular for novice organizers to decide how to run an event that fits their needs. To address this gap we developed a planning kit that is organized around 12 key decision that organizers need to make when preparing and running a hackathon, and the tradeoffs that drive decision-making. The main planning kit is available online while this report is meant as a downloadable and citable resource., Comment: 24 pages, 0 figures

In hackathons, small teams work together over a specified period of time to complete a project of interest. Such time-bounded hackathon-style events have become increasingly popular across different domains in recent years. Collegiate hackathons, just one of the many variants of hackathons, that are supported by the largest hackathon league (https://mlh.io/) alone attract over 65,000 participants among more than 200 events each year. Variously known as data dives, codefests, hack-days, sprints, edit-a-thons, mapathons, and so on, such events vary depending on different audiences and with divergent aims: for example, whether teams know each other beforehand, whether the event is structured as a competition with prizes, whether the event is open or requires membership or invitations, and whether the desired outcome is primarily a product innovation, learning a new skill, forming a community around a cause, solving a technical problem that requires intensive focus by a group, or just having fun. Taken together, hackathons offer new opportunities and challenges for collaboration by affording explicit, predictable, time-bounded spaces for collaborative work and engaging with new audiences. With the goal of discussing opportunities and challenges surrounding hackathons of different kinds, this one-day workshop brought together researchers, experienced event organizers, and practitioners to share and discuss their practical experiences. Empirical insights from studying these events may help position the CHI community to better study, plan and design hackathon-style events as socio-technical systems that support new modes of production and collaboration.