Technology

On Hackathons And Karma

Are hackathons a gimmick or do they lead to meaningful outcomes?

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Did you feel a slight tremor rumble across the legal landscape this weekend? If so, then you may have been tuned into the collective energy of hundreds of legal hackers spread across 40 cities in 21 countries and six continents hard at work in the first-ever Global Legal Hackathon.

The mission was both simple and audacious: Bring the worldwide legal community together over a single weekend with the singular purpose of rapidly development technology to improve the legal industry.

Participating teams could target solutions directed to either a private benefit that would address the business and practice of law or a public benefit relating to good government, legal systems, and access to justice.

The organizers of the hackathon deserve credit for pulling this off. It was, beyond doubt, the largest coordinated legal hackathon ever. And all the sponsors, hosts, and participants deserve credit as well for their contributions of space, technology, time, and talent.

As I am writing this, the hackathon is still underway. I do not know what ideas and innovations might come out of it. But so much effort on such a grand scale raises the question: Are hackathons a gimmick or do they lead to meaningful outcomes?

I recently tweeted, “We are sometimes so bedazzled by tech that we don’t stop to consider whether it is well executed or solves an actual problem.” That was my way of summing up a thoughtful post by Nicole Bradick of Theory and Principle. Bradick’s post made the point that it is remarkably easy to build a bad application but much harder to build a truly useful one.

It’s one of the both good and bad things about the age of technology we find ourselves in: we’ve made it so easy to build digital products that anyone can do it — in the course of a semester, as a side project in your organization, or as a weekend warrior. That ease is excellent if your goal is to just build an app and learn something from the process, but it can be a problem if your goal is to build a successful product that provides value to its intended users.

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That is the danger of a hackathon. Hackathons try to tackle difficult problems over the course of a day or a weekend. But difficult problems are rarely susceptible to rapidly developed solutions.

Many conditions of a hackathon work against quality. Applications are developed without benefit of market research or user testing. Time pressures can result in poorly coded applications and poorly executed user interfaces. The goal becomes winning the competition rather than truly solving a problem. After it is all over, prototypes often get left behind, right along with the empty pizza boxes and beer cans, never to be fully developed.

But hackathons also have a number of benefits. Above all else, they provoke spurts of creative thinking that otherwise might never have taken place and bring together as teams people who might never before have had occasion to work with each other.

And amid the adrenalin rushes and caffeine highs, good ideas do come out of hackathons. I’ve judged and observed enough of these to know that hackathons really do produce practical ideas worth expanding and developing.

In my opinion, hackathons are most valuable when they focus on access to justice. There are plenty of commercial software vendors thinking about how to build better products that they can sell to lawyers. But there are too few technology developers focused on how we can better deliver legal help to those of low and moderate incomes. Hackathons spur creative development in this underserved area.

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For the Global Legal Hackathon, there was another benefit. Call it the karma factor. Following on Twitter and social media this weekend as hacker teams all over the world excitedly worked at bettering the legal and justice systems, the energy was almost palpable. With so much activity on such a broad and diverse scale, it seems impossible that good ideas won’t come out of it.

But even apart from the prototypes and concepts that were developed this weekend, the scope and scale of the Global Legal Hackathon served to flatten the world of legal technology, to demonstrate that we’re all in this together. From Chile to China, from Denver to Dubai, hackers came together over the span of a weekend to make the legal system better.

Whatever the actual applications it bred, the Global Legal Hackathon created a kind of legal technology good karma, and that karma is likely to fuel even further cooperation and innovation in law on a global scale.

Robert Ambrogi Bob AmbrogiRobert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

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