Civic Hackathons: Innovation, Procurement, or Civic Engagement?

TLDR

Governments worldwide are increasingly providing open data and promoting civic hackathons to encourage public use of these datasets. The paper argues that civic hackathons can serve both as a covert procurement channel and a civic engagement tool, and calls for research to explore these dual roles. Civic hackathons incentivize developers with prize money to create commercial applications that leverage open data for citizen services.

Abstract

Abstract At all levels, governments around the world are moving toward the provision of open data, that is, the direct provision to citizens, the private sector, and other third parties, of raw government datasets, controlled by a relatively permissible license. In tandem with this distribution of open data is the promotion of civic hackathons, or “app contests” by government. The civic hackathon is designed to offer prize money to developers as a way to spur innovative use of open data, more specifically the creation of commercial software applications that deliver services to citizens. Within this context, we propose that the civic hackathon has the potential to act in multiple ways, possibly as a backdoor to the traditional government procurement process, and as a form of civic engagement. We move beyond much of the hype of civic hackathons, critically framing an approach to understanding civic hackathons through these two lenses. Key questions for future research emphasize the emerging, and important, nature of this research path.