  Hackathons and similar time-bounded events have become a popular form of
collaboration. They are commonly organized as in-person events during which
teams engage in intense collaboration over a short period of time to complete a
project that is of interest to them. Most research to date has focused on
studying how teams collaborate in a co-located setting, pointing towards the
advantages of radical co-location. The global pandemic of 2020, however, has
led to many hackathons moving online, which challenges our current
understanding of how they function. In this paper, we address this gap by
presenting findings from a multiple-case study of 10 hackathon teams that
participated in 4 hackathons across two continents. By analyzing the collected
data, we found that teams merged synchronous and asynchronous means of
communication to maintain a common understanding of work progress as well as to
maintain awareness of each other's tasks. Task division was self-assigned based
on individual skills or interests, while leaders emerged from different
strategies (e.g., participant experience, the responsibility of registering the
team in an event). Some of the affordances of in-person hackathons, such as the
radical co-location of team members, could be partially reproduced in teams
that kept synchronous communication channels while working (i.e., shared audio
territories), in a sort of "radical virtual co-location". However, others, such
as interactions with other teams, easy access to mentors, and networking with
other participants, decreased. In addition, the technical constraints of the
different communication tools and platforms brought technical problems and were
overwhelming to participants. Our work contributes to understanding the virtual
collaboration of small teams in the context of online hackathons and how
technologies and event structures proposed by organizers imply this
collaboration.
