This past August, Lisa Federer attended the NCBI Genomics Hackathon on August 14-16, 2017 to study scientific hackathons. The hackathon primarily focused on medical informatics, advanced bioinformatics analy
sis of next generation sequencing data, and metadata. Over the course of three days, students, scholars, and researchers worked to develop software/ pipelines for genomic analyses and medical informatics data.
Lisa tracked their conversations, tools, and work habits throughout the event, and days following the program.
Utilizing R and trace ethnography, Lisa examined different patterns of communication among teams and whether these have an impact on outcomes and outputs of the hackathon. Check out her repo which contains code used to create visual representations of hackathon communication in the form of Slack channels, Github Repos, and Google Docs!