Developers who just want to have fun organize Take It Back-athon

The list of complaints is nine deep:

Corporate hackathons aren’t adhering to judging criteria. Participants are being exploited for free labor. The large cash prizes create an unfriendly environment. There aren’t enough minorities.

In short, they aren’t always fun. But local computer programmers Suz Hinton and Pawel Szymczykowski say hackathons should be.

For that reason, the two have organized Take It Back-athon, a noncorporate, nonstartup event scheduled for March 1 at a location to be determined.

Take It Back-athon thumbs its nose at money-centric events, and gives a nod to Demo Days of the 1990s that focused on creating entertaining hacks that appealed to an audience, rather than judges.

“I want to do stuff for fun and not worry about whether it’s going to be a successful business, or whether some VC (venture capitalist) thinks (he or she) can make a quick buck off it, or whether I’ve furthered the goals of a specific sponsor and given his team something he can then turn into a product,” Szymczykowski said.

The event encourages participants to work on ideas that aren’t necessarily tech-centric.

“Hack on anything,” reads the description at www.takeitbackathon.com. “It doesn’t have to be software. You can make a robot. Or design a board game in Illustrator, or compose a love song about cats and capybaras.”

Prizes will be awarded for categories such as “least likely to be successful on Kickstarter” and “most gratuitous use of APIs.” (API stands for application programming interface, which determines how software components interact.)

Take It Back-athon was an idea the organizers had kicked around for some time, but finished their plans after the AT&T Developer Summit hackathon, which took place during International CES in January.

Judging was supposed to give equal weight to four criteria — presentation, originality of idea, difficulty of technical implementation, and use of AT&T APIs — but Hinton doesn’t think the rules were followed.

The winner of $25,000 in the wearables contest was SafeNecklace, neckwear that tracks children on field trips using a Bluetooth beacon, although it wasn’t necessarily complicated.

A finalist in the API contest created a search-and-rescue app, as did several other teams.

Meanwhile, other impressive projects that the met criteria went unrecognized, Hinton said, such as a Pebble watch that was hacked to create geofencing for dogs.

For corporations, sponsoring hackathons encourages developers to experiment with their application programming interface and get direct feedback, which allows for testing and improving their problem points, Szymczykowski said.

It’s also a way to showcase their technologies and get people hacking on their platforms.

“We’ve slowly seen with each hackathon that we’ve participated in, even just in Vegas, that the sponsors get really prominent. Sponsors are superimportant because they sponsor food, they sponsor room renting or whatever. They also sponsor prizes. But it’s gotten to the point where sponsors are basically just the whole shebang,” Hinton said.

“You have to use the sponsor’s API to be eligible to do this and that. It’s so restrictive and you actually feel like you’re doing work for them, which, if that’s the only reason why they’re interested, then they shouldn’t be sponsoring the event.”

The friends often create silly projects at hackathons in mild political protest.

At AT&T hackathon, Hinton created a 3-D-printed bracelet that monitors the wearer’s pulse and texts a kitten photo if the person is having a panic attack.

At an e-commerce hackathon in New York City, Szymczykowski built “Etsy Bitsy Spider,” a hack featuring a spider that spins a web to show social connections on Etsy.

Rather than doing a business pitch, he went onstage and sang “Itsy Bitsy Spider” in a monotonous tone.

“The reaction was great,” he said. “After all the stuffy business presentations, it broke up the monotony.”

Often, Hinton said, organizers will thank them for doing something different.

AT&T did not respond to request for comment.

Although developers aren’t always happy with the way corporate events are run, they can’t resist the opportunity to network.

At AT&T Developer Summit, Hinton took home several cards and met people from all over the world who expressed interest in teaming up in the future.

She also said the weekendlong work-fests are a good motivator to finish a neglected project.

Corporate or sponsored hackathons aren’t all bad. It’s a fine line.

Hinton points to civic data hackathons and charitable hackathons that make volunteering fun. Locally organized Vegas Hack was sponsored but not exploitative, she said, and had judges coding alongside participants.

Szymczykowski said there are local and national events that strike the right balance, focusing on music, comedy and health.

“We just want to hack for fun. Not for money,” Szymczykowski said. “We like making cool things. A lot of people are like that but the availability of hackathons that aren’t startup-related and judged based on things like, ‘Can this make money? Will people invest in you?’ … There’s not enough of that.”

Contact reporter Kristy Totten at ktotten@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3809. Follow @kristy_tea on Twitter.