{"id":16370,"date":"2018-05-07T09:00:17","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T09:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/pnr\/?p=16370"},"modified":"2026-02-03T18:28:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T18:28:17","slug":"a-unique-data-experience-reflections-on-esfcoms-inaugural-hackathon","status":"archive","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/a-unique-data-experience-reflections-on-esfcoms-inaugural-hackathon\/","title":{"rendered":"A Unique Data Experience: Reflections on ESFCOM\u2019s Inaugural Hackathon"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Today’s blog is by Nancy Shin, Sewell Memorial Fund Librarian Fellow at Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine<\/strong>. Welcome, Nancy!<\/em><\/p>\n

The most extraordinary<\/em> thing happened to Washington State University\u2019s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine (ESFCOM) the weekend of April 13 -15, 2018.\u00a0 ESFCOM hosted its inaugural Hackathon, which was organized by the College Technology Incubator Officer, Andrew Richards.\u00a0 It was well attended by people from all walks of life and subject expertise including students and healthcare providers.\u00a0 So, the big question is what exactly is a hackathon and why all the hype?<\/p>\n

A hackathon is a social event that is focused on building small, innovative, and new technology projects.\u00a0 It brings together teams of people to work on a common project within an overarching theme; at the end of the event, teams formally present their projects for judging.\u00a0 The hackathon can last from 4 hours to 1 week (sleep is optional) and can involve large cash purses as prizes.\u00a0 Typically, projects are technological and can result in the development of a new app or feature on a website in response to a theme; in the case of ESFCOM\u2019s Hackathon, the theme was \u201cchallenges in rural healthcare.\u201d The common misconception about a hackathon is that it is an event that is strictly designed for computer programmers, engineers, and software developers \u2013 i.e. anyone who codes! However, other skills like research, design, project management, data management, and leadership are also important to the dynamic of an ideal hackathon team.<\/p>\n

Arguably the first hackathon was hosted by OpenBSD in 1999, which is an operating system; ten developers came together to work on various software problems over the span of a week (Davis, 2016).\u00a0 Since then, hackathons have more famously been hosted by various companies like Facebook and Yahoo in 2005 and 2006, respectively, in order to catalyze new innovations in a relatively \u201crisk-free\u201d and \u201ccreative\u201d environment (Davis, 2016). In general, hackathons are organized by one of the following communities: open source software companies, tech companies, sponsored competitions, and community institutions (Davis, 2016).<\/p>\n

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PTme, the winning team<\/p><\/div>\n

In the health field, a big community hackathon organizer is the National Institutes of Health (NIH) which often hosts hackathons with a bioinformatics theme.\u00a0 Although the ESFCOM\u2019s Hackathon was heavily inspired by MIT\u2019s \u201cGrand Hack & Hacking Medicine,\u201d what makes the community hackathon at ESFCOM so different and unique from other health hackathons is that it encourages a diverse<\/em> skillset to tackle healthcare problems.\u00a0 For example, the winning team PTme was made up of a diverse skillset that included developers, medical students, business leaders, and engineering students while my own hackathon team was made up of a mathematician, bioengineer, computer engineer, designer, and health\/data librarian.\u00a0 Another unique feature of the ESFCOM\u2019s Hackathon was the involvement of health librarians in the Spokane area in creating a \u201cResearch Station\u201d that provided active research and data management for the participating teams.\u00a0 The volunteer librarians were able to provide direct research support to assist with each team\u2019s research and data management needs.\u00a0 It is those two qualities, skill diversity and library support, which makes ESFCOM\u2019s Hackathon one of a kind and a successful model for other health communities\/organizations to follow for their future hackathons!<\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n

Davis, R. C. (2016). Hackathons for libraries and librarians.\u00a0Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian,\u00a035<\/em>(2), 87-91. doi:10.1080\/01639269.2016.1208561<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s blog is by Nancy Shin, Sewell Memorial Fund Librarian Fellow at Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine. Welcome, Nancy! The most extraordinary thing happened to Washington State University\u2019s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine (ESFCOM) the weekend of April 13 -15, 2018.\u00a0 ESFCOM hosted its inaugural Hackathon, which was organized by… Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16370","post","type-post","status-archive","format-standard","hentry","category-data-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16370"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16379,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16370\/revisions\/16379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}