I think the 1-2 week long "workshop" format would surely work better than the 1-2 day hackathon grind. I attended one for archaeal cell biology; it felt like a less-well-funded version of this. Populating it with grad students + financial incentives would have probably been even better.
With a field as small and new as archaea this worked extremely well; and in general, I think microbiology is often a really suitable avenue for a hackathon-like format. More broadly, I think the key thing is centering it around an organism (or technology), giving 2-3x the time that you would have for an analogous tech competition would give pretty good results.
That all sounds completely reasonable. Frankly, I've never run a hackathon and only participated in a couple while in college, so I tried my best to adapt the structure. What you've presented seems like a good approach to getting this to work for biology, and sounds like it already has.
The challenge though is that unlike software, where you can do things from wherever, doing an extended week or two hackathon is tough for biologists. People work jobs (academic, industry, whatever), and doing biology takes time. Not sure how many people would be able to dedicate a couple weeks to an unpaid or low-paid project.
Yeah, a couple weeks is probably pie-in-the-sky. Something on the scale of 4-8 days seems more feasible, but still rough... Maybe the secret is adding a prestige aspect or something. Not sure.
I think the 1-2 week long "workshop" format would surely work better than the 1-2 day hackathon grind. I attended one for archaeal cell biology; it felt like a less-well-funded version of this. Populating it with grad students + financial incentives would have probably been even better.
With a field as small and new as archaea this worked extremely well; and in general, I think microbiology is often a really suitable avenue for a hackathon-like format. More broadly, I think the key thing is centering it around an organism (or technology), giving 2-3x the time that you would have for an analogous tech competition would give pretty good results.
That all sounds completely reasonable. Frankly, I've never run a hackathon and only participated in a couple while in college, so I tried my best to adapt the structure. What you've presented seems like a good approach to getting this to work for biology, and sounds like it already has.
The challenge though is that unlike software, where you can do things from wherever, doing an extended week or two hackathon is tough for biologists. People work jobs (academic, industry, whatever), and doing biology takes time. Not sure how many people would be able to dedicate a couple weeks to an unpaid or low-paid project.
Yeah, a couple weeks is probably pie-in-the-sky. Something on the scale of 4-8 days seems more feasible, but still rough... Maybe the secret is adding a prestige aspect or something. Not sure.