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349

Civic Hackathons: Innovation, Procurement, or

Civic Engagement?
Peter Johnson
Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Pamela Robinson
School of Urban and Regional Planning, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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.
KEY WORDS: civic hackathon, big data, geoweb, web2.0, civic engagement, procurement, apps,
open data

Introduction: From Open Data to an Evaluation of Civic Hackathons

cross the globe, governments of all levels are seeking to engage their citizens and
software development communities using open government data promoted and
distributed through application programming contests. Known as app contests or
civic hackathons, these largely government-sponsored events present open data
as an entrepreneurial carrot: by liberating data, governments create opportunities
for new mobile device app development, often driven by goals of improving services
and citizengovernment relationships (Nath, 2011). By hosting these events, governments hope to signal their commitment to more transparent and open ways of
governing while also encouraging new app development. Despite their popularity,
the civic hackathon is a relatively new phenomenon that has yet to receive much
research attention. To date there is little coordinated research to assess and track
the short-term benefits and long-term implications of the hackathon event, for both
sponsoring governments and hackathon participants.
Civic hackathons tap into the current zeitgeist of social innovation and entrepreneurship by connecting civically minded hackers and coders to governments seeking
to present a more open, transparent, and connected face to their citizenry. When we
look beyond the buzz of the civic hackathon event itself, many questions arise. As the
outcome of a hackathon is a series of apps, we must consider if these events also serve
a form of procurement, one that takes place outside of traditional government
Review of Policy Research, Volume 31, Number 4 (2014) 10.1111/ropr.12074
2014 by The Policy Studies Organization. All rights reserved.

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Peter Johnson and Pamela Robinson

purchasing procedures? Additionally, we question whether the apps produced have

any impact on government-provided services? Lastly, we question whether citizen
engagement with government is either enhanced or restricted through direct
participation in a hackathon, and/or by using the apps that are produced by the
hackathon.
To consider these questions, we present an evaluation of civic hackathons
through the twin lenses of procurement and civic engagement. Identifying this
tension between procurement and engagement allows us to move beyond the
current enthusiasm for civic hackathons, placing a focus instead on ethical and
governance outcomes, as well as identifying key trajectories for future research in
this rapidly expanding space.
Characterizing Open Data and Civic Hackathons
The ubiquity of the Internet in everyday lives has led to e-government initiatives
and significant advances in digital service and information provision, for example,
by moving government forms and payments online (Brown, 2007; Chang &
Kannan, 2008) and making the transactions between governments and their citizens easier and faster (Yildiz, 2007). Unlike typical documents (e.g., reports,
minutes, budgets) distributed via e-government portals, open data provides raw
digital data that are collected as part of governmental processes. These raw (or
lightly edited) data are a deliberate choice to move away from distilled and packaged information provision to citizens, and instead is envisioned as open ended,
allowing data to enable a variety of uses in the hands of citizens as well as the private,
public, and non-profit sectors. Open data is a term applied to the sharing of once
closed or only internally accessible government data with the public, subject to
limited restrictions on use and reuse (Janssen, Charalabidis, & Zuiderwijk, 2012).
The Open Knowledge Foundation provides what is essentially a manifesto for open
data: it should be freely available for anyone to use, repurpose, and republish as
they wish, governed with an open license that explicitly permits these types of
activities. Data should be collected close to the originating source and frequently, to
allow for automated processing, and be free of proprietary formats (Open
Knowledge Foundation, 2014). If the raw data cannot be reused at will, it fails the
definition of open. Open data typically adds a transparency motive to existing
e-government initiatives that pioneered the simple provision of government information and services online (Bertot, Jaeger, & Grimes, 2010; Piotrowski & Van
Ryzin, 2007).
As more and more governments offer open data, communities of tech-savvy
developers have responded by creating apps (software for personal mobile devices)
that use government open data to generate content or provide services that ordinary citizens may find useful. More recently, with the explosion in use of mobile
apps for every aspect of peoples interests and lives, has also come the increase in
popularity of the civic hackathon. The civic hackathon is a time-limited (typically
hours or days) event, launched at a specific venue, where enthusiasts, government
workers, interested citizens, and the private sector meet in a collaborative environment to access government open data. The goal of a civic hackathon is to leverage
government open data to develop software applications that address issues of

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shared civic importance. Civic hackathons are often coupled with prize money or
other material rewards for participants, and typically involve the release or promotion of new or potentially highly valued government data. Civic hackathons often
present a specific problem or theme (such as transit, or engagement), to which the
sponsoring government aims to direct participant efforts toward the development
of an app serving some sort of public and/or market need. The recent example of
the federally sponsored Canadian Open Data Experience (CODE) hackathon
(www.canadianopendataexperience.com), demonstrates the general approach of
the hackathon. Held over 48 hours in March 2014, the $25,000 winner of CODE
was an app called newRoots, designed to help new immigrants and current residents to find a new neighborhood that matches their employment interests with
housing availability and presence of specific ethnic communities. With the goal of
helping people to make a community and household location choice that offers the
greatest opportunity for them and maximizes their potential to be successful and
productive citizens (CODE, 2014), newRoots aims to package and deliver government data to meet a perceived need currently unfilled by existing government
services. In developing this app, the development team drew on federal open data
on housing opportunities, labor market trends, rates of employment, income, crime
rates, and the ethnocultural diversity of communities.
Civic hackathons follow a template set by the Apps for Democracy contest
sponsored by the city of Washington, DC, in 2008. This contest was one of the first
large-scale civic hackathons, coinciding with the creation of a municipal open data
catalogue. According to the organizers, during the month-long contest, 47 smartphone apps were created, representing a value of over $2,300,000 in software to the
city of Washington, for a government outlay of only $50,000 in prize money
(Corbett, 2014). This stated value of software that was developed during the Apps
for Democracy contest represents the approximate price of private sector contracts
to develop equivalent software. Despite the initial perceived success of this contest,
and a follow-up contest in 2009 that focused on citizen requests, the long-term
implications, benefits, and sustainability of software developed through this contest
remains unclear (Nagesh, 2010).
The civic hackathon phenomenon has grown worldwide. Early in 2014, Peshawar, Pakistan held a civic hackathon, presented as an opportunity to learn new
skills, meet intelligent people and do good for the city by bringing technology
innovation to civic services (Code for Pakistan, 2013). Similarly, in Santiago, Chile
this year, a civic hackathon was held to tackle issues of health, education, housing,
and democratic quality (UNESCO, 2014), with two of its goals being to: 1. Promote
the use of public data for the development of innovative digital applications on
Health, Housing, Education and Democratic Quality, which are useful to the public
[and] 2. Fostering a culture of transparency, accountability and reuse of public
information for social purposes and public interest (LabCivico, 2013). From Code
for America to Industry Canadas 2014 CODE event, civic hackathons are simultaneously using open data as the platform for new technology development while also
striving to deliver civic engagement outcomes. We unpack these dual goals, in an
effort to move beyond the dominant hype surrounding civic hackathons, toward
identification of the underlying implications of this phenomenon for government
citizendeveloper relationships.

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Civic Hackathons as Procurement

A major driver of government provision of open data is the assumption that data,
once provided for citizen and private sector use, will not only reduce government
costs, but also unlock hidden entrepreneurial value, driving software-related economic development (Janssen et al., 2012). In many instances, the provision of open
data comes with incentive for developers to improve or expand on the service
offerings of government (Nath, 2011). This rationale demonstrates the shifting role
of government from direct service provider to citizens, to the more libertarian
imagining of government as a platform, limited to maintaining basic infrastructure
while the private sector assumes the role of primary service provider to citizens
(Longo, 2011; OReilly, 2011). The rise of the developers, often termed civic
entrepreneurs (Alfred & Alfred, 2013), is symptomatic of this view of open data as an
economic driver, with the civic hackathon serving as an incubator. Despite the
commonly held belief that open data provision drives software application-centric
innovation, an actual quantitative measure of the economic value of open data
resulting from its exploitation through civic hackathons, remains to be developed,
with largely anecdotal claims of dollar values of applications (Zuiderwijk & Janssen,
2014).
By providing open data, government makes a significant component of the
underlying basis for service provision and decision-making available to third parties
(Robinson, Yu, Zeller, & Felten, 2009). This allows for the independent generation of
civic-focused products and services, without direct government oversight or input,
other than the provision of data (Brabham, 2009; Janssen et al., 2012). Whether
intentional or unintentional, this provision could be seen to facilitate the outsourcing
of government technology/software procurement. Until relatively recently, when
governments needed a service or a product, their principal mechanism for sourcing
was a procurement process. But now, with the rise of open data, an alternate option
exists. Compared with the use of a tightly prescribed and standard vendor-seeking
process, could civic hackathons now serve as a replacement for RFPs (requests for
proposals) with prize money to motivate participants to generate a software application or another product built on open data, intended to serve a government need?
Here governments capture the momentum and innovative potential of the civic
hackathon and use it in a modified version of the standard procurement process.
While civic hackathons are not a clear substitution for procurement, particularly in
that software applications developed in hackathons have not yet been proven to have
the same longevity or mission-critical nature of typical government IT systems that
would be procured through traditional channels, they do have the potential to
generate usable products for the government hosts.
Considering these outcomes, we must ask if there is potential for the civic
hackathon to act as an informal path for government procurement? For example,
if hackathons produce viable products, does this mean that they are a reliable means
of securing services for less money, with less oversight compared with the at-times
restrictive traditional procurement process? Implicit in these questions are concerns
over who receives the dominant share of value from work done during a civic
hackathon, and in particular if application designers (or more specifically, the
participants) receive fair remuneration for their work?

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In the private sector, there are many new ventures whose business model is
based on crowdsourced contributions. With this approach, innovative contributors are sharing ideas with the market instead of being contracted to do the work
with up-front compensation and/or the retention of intellectual property rights
(Brabham, 2009). One example is Dandy (http://dandy.co) whose business model
involves recruiting entrepreneurs to pitch ideas that are then peer reviewed
through crowdsourcing, and then taken to market with some profit sharing for
the original developer. The issue of reciprocity is demonstrated here, with a
recent quote from the CEO of Dandy: I think people are getting more collaborative. . . . The way we set up Dandy was to encourage people to understand
that you shouldnt be going into this to expect fair market value for what youre
doing (Dingman, 2014). In the private sector, participants may knowingly accept
the risk that their entrepreneurial efforts may not produce billable hours or
projects, but when a hackathon is sponsored by a government, with a focus on
civic issues, what are the obligations of government to the participants (and the
public) as the convener of these hackathons? Are hackathon participants fairly
compensated for their software development efforts, and importantly, do they
expect to be?
Ultimately, in the case of a civic hackathon, we argue that there is a need to
consider the nature of the relationship between the government host and the event
participants. Is it the convening government that benefits, the hackathon participant, or both? And if there are benefits, what form do they take, are they evenly
shared, or is even this base expectation of benefit unrealistic in our new era of
smaller governments and smaller budgets? This focus on reciprocity is critical, as we
run the risk of civic hackathons becoming virtual sweatshops in which the convener unfairly derives disproportionate economic value from the sleeves-rolled-upjoiner, participatory vibe of the hackathon.
Hackathons as Civic Engagement
As an extension of their open data strategies, governments have positioned civic
hackathons as an effort to engage the public in two ways; first the hosting of a
participatory event, and second, through the creation of new apps designed for
citizen use, based on government open data. This framing of civic hackathons as
public participation or civic engagement activities is emphasized in recent efforts to
define civic hacking. In 2013, civic designer and organizer Jake Levitas wrote Civic
hacking is the act of quickly improving the processes and systems of local government with new tools or approaches, conducted with cities, by citizens, as an act of
citizenship and then ultimately concluded that Civic hacking is the new civic
engagementand its here to stay (Levitas, 2013).
To begin to frame the capacity of civic hackathon to act as public engagement
activities, there are a number of criteria for good citizengovernment interactions
that we can evaluate against. The International Association of Public Participation is
a respected international organization that seeks to improve public participation
worldwide, and their work is respected by citizens and governments at all scales.
Table 1 illustrates their 7 Core Values for the Practice of Public Participation
which we then apply to civic hackathons to query their engagement potential.

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Table 1. Core Values for the Practice of Public Participation

1. Public participation is based on the belief that those who are affected by a decision have a right to be involved in
the decision-making process.
2. Public participation includes the promise that the publics contribution will influence the decision.
3. Public participation promotes sustainable decisions by recognizing and communicating the needs and interests of
all participants, including decision makers.
4. Public participation seeks out and facilitates the involvement of those potentially affected by or interested in a
decision.
5. Public participation seeks input from participants in designing how they participate.
6. Public participation provides participants with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way.
7. Public participation communicates to participants how their input affected the decision.
Source: IAPP (2014)

Of the seven core values for the practice of public participation, the strongest fit
between what civic hackathons offer to support citizengovernment interactions is
goal #6: Public participation provides participants with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way. Civic hackathons should only be framed as a good form of
citizen engagement if participants are provided with a clearly positioned design
challenge and the necessary open data. When we consider whom the participants
are, what happens with the apps once developed, and what the longer-term outcomes of the civic hackathon process are, the need for further information and
clarification arises. For example, if the participants are local, then civic hackathons
have the potential to engage citizen-participants in developing solutions to problems that more directly affect them (see core values #1 and #4) and in designing
their modes of participation via the app and its interactivity (core value #5). If the
apps created are put into use, then the participants could have influence over
future decisions by using the open data, the app, and its outputs (core value #2),
and the participants could perhaps see how their participation in the hackathon
influenced future decisions (core value #7). But until research is conducted, in the
longer term it is unclear whether a civic hackathon is substantially more than a
stunt to create short-term buzz, or whether its outcomes will have long-term
impacts (core value #3). We ask if the consideration and assessment of these values
is missing or excluded in the rush and general excitement to simply liberate open
data and unleash the crowd to create an app or product of variable quality or
purpose? This line of questioning should be formalized and critically explored to
assess the impacts of civic hackathons on civic engagement.
The release of open data and the use of hackathons for improving public
engagement, ranging from simple rapport building to using open data and citizen
apps to provide direct access to or feedback on government services, is neither
simple nor straightforward. This highly variable process produces many questions
and concerns about the place of civic hackathons as an effective and valued tool
among the current and future practice of civic engagement. Despite ongoing
enthusiasm for the civic engagement possibilities of a hackathon, many questions
are raised concerning the extent to which a one-time limited event (the civic
hackathon) can truly enrich citizengovernment relationships? At this point, governments continue to engage citizens through a variety of activities ranging from
town hall meetings to using wikis to solicit input on the policy development process.
If civic hackathons are going to be a civic engagement tool that is more frequently
used, there is a real need to more carefully scrutinize their impacts. This area of

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research on civic hackathons, their participants, and their outcomes is critical to the
development of an assessment process for civic hackathons. Such an assessment
process or protocol would facilitate the assessment of these events the same way we
assess other civic engagement activities, such as participatory budgeting. By asking
who participated and why, we can begin to analyze the types of participants and
their motivations. By identifying and assessing the impacts of the events, we may
begin to discern whether participants in these events really do feel more connected
to their government as a result of their experience. And by tracing these impacts
over time, we can build a better understanding of durability of these impacts over
time.
Conclusions
No longer a novelty, civic hackathons at all governmental levels are now becoming
commonplace. The related discussion of their relative value (or lack thereof) is
timely, as space is quickly being created for critical questions, reflections, and
needed evaluation. In the summer of 2013, the popular press was filled with
questions and statements such as are civic hackathons stupid? (Badger, 2013),
with proponents countering that civic hackathons matter (Korte, 2013), for
example, through the production of applications that improve service delivery and
inspire collaboration. Despite these contrasting perspectives, the absence of academic research leaves us questioning the outcomes of the civic hackathon phenomenon and its impacts on citizengovernment relationships.
If the civic hackathon phenomenon persists and grows, there is a clear need for
research to assess their impacts, outcomes, and the value of their deployment (and
value as derived by whom). One simple way to measure value is through descriptive
statistics surrounding contest inputs and outputs. For instance, the low hanging
fruit research on app contests would include inventorying and counting: the
number and type of apps developed, the number and type of participants, and the
coverage of the event in traditional and social media. In light of the potential role
that hackathons could play in securing government-needed apps, the procurement
and compensation elements of hackathons warrant further attention. Compared
with their loose potential to deliver civic engagement, it seems likely that the greater
potential impact on citizengovernment relationships may come from the actual
apps produced and research attention should be focused here. In theory, the
provision of open data and the incentive the hackathon provides should result in
the development of new apps that address place-specific needs and wants that
should ultimately benefit the citizens of that particular jurisdiction. The reality of
this situation, however, is inconclusive, with the implementation and overall evaluation of civic hackathon software applications frequently ignored or forgotten,
leading to limited adoption and claims of limited value from the hackathon process
itself. The gap between design and implementation signals the importance of
tracking the outcomes of civic hackathons over time. If hackathon-produced apps
have little prospect of being widely adopted, and have no life or impact beyond the
event itself, host governments run the risk of the hackathon process being labeled
as disingenuous engagement activities and also of exhausting participants appetite
for future involvement in new activities.

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Overall, the discussion presented here begins to identify questions and issues for
assessment to evaluate the civic hackathon phenomenon. It signals the need for
targeted hackathon research that tracks these events as they occur, tracing both
immediate and longer-term impacts. This research should also consider the extent
to which governments are meeting their projected goals for citizen participation
and engagement through these events. Answering these kinds of citizen- and
government-centered value questions and tracking change over time will allow us to
differentiate between hackathons as stunts, or as innovative citizengovernment
interactions with reciprocal benefits that produce new technologies and ideas that
respond to citizen challenges and needs. While civic hackathons may currently be in
favor, further research is needed so that hosts and participants can differentiate
between a side-show or a meaningful opportunity for innovation and engagement.
About the Authors
Peter Johnson is Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo. He has published in such journals as ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies and GeoJournal.
Pamela Robinson is Associate Professor, School of Urban and Regional Planning, Ryerson
University. Her book, Urban Sustainability: Reconciling Space and Place, co-edited with Dale and
Dushenko, was published in 2012.

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