Developing and validating a scale for motivation in participating in time-bounded collaborative events

Abstract

Time-bounded collaborative events bring together participants from different backgrounds to address a problem by creating a computational artifact over a short period of time (e.g., one or two days). Examples of these events include hackathons, game jams, codefests, ideathons, etc. Time-bounded events present minimal restrictions for participation, with hundreds of people attending an increasing number of events each year. There are different reasons why people decide to participate in time-bounded collaborative events. While several studies focused on studying the motivations to participate in these events, there is no consensus on how to measure this motivation. This paper aims to develop and validate a measure of motivation that addresses the participants’ willingness to attend a time-bounded collaborative event. The construction process of our scale used quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques. Our model of motivation is composed of a set of 20 questions that are grouped into five sub-constructs that measure different motivations: Technical, Personal Curiosity, Personal Ideation, Social Teamwork, and Business Connections. Our results show that our measure has internal reliability and convergent and discriminant validity. Our findings contribute to a broader understanding of the motivations for participating in time-bounded collaborative events and provide some implications for the research and practice of such events.