Survey: Hackathons and Open SourceMay 10th, 2016Cristiano Betta2 minute read

TL;DR - I ran a Twitter Poll with interesting but insignificant results. Now I'm running a more extensive survey to see if I can get some more results. You should fill in the survey!

I ran a Twitter Poll last week asking people about their involvement in Open Source.

Quick poll. Do you go to hackathons? And do you contribute to Open Source (OS) in any way?

— Cristiano Betta 🎄 (@cbetta) May 6, 2016

I'm really happy with the 426 responses I got! Thank you all! The results proved quite interesting and I noticed a few things:

• Of my respondents about 70%+ contributed to Open Source, independent of whether they attended hackathons.
• The people who contributed to Open Source were split about 50/50 between the hackers and the non hackers.

In other words: there is not much of a correlation between hackathons and open source software (based on this poll).

A few added some notes to their response:

@cbetta voted but for some more detail: I do a lot of OS work, I don’t like hackdays as they are competitive and stressful

— smöl james (@varjmes) May 6, 2016

@cbetta Only for work (hackathons). Yes.

— Paul Burt 🍕 (@ThatMightBePaul) May 6, 2016

@cbetta @jesslynnrose Last commercial hackathon we participated in we github'd everything during the event so it'd be OSS'd before judging.

— Willa (@willasaywhat) May 6, 2016

In the end I feel the poll left more questions than it provided answers to. Therefore I am now running ran a longer survey to answer some of these:

• Do people think hackathons influenced them to do Open Source?
• Why do people contribute to Open Source?
• How do they mostly contribute to Open Source?
• What is stopping people from contributing to Open Source?

The survey is closed now closed now will be open until the end of June. I'd love your entry even if you don't do hackathons or Open Source!