alt Hacker Newsas someone who got into linux and open source in the early 90s I will never stop being sad that "hackathon" morphed into a competitive activity, rather than "let's all get together and build some free software collaboratively". I guess the latter tends to get called a "dev sprint" these days, but it's always the first thing I think of when I hear "hackathon"
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> "let's all get together and build some free software collaboratively".
G0v hackathons in Taiwan are still this, at the end everyone presents what they worked on and there's no judging or anything. Some of the projects have been going for years.
There was a hackathon two weeks ago, you can see all the videos from all the demos here https://m.youtube.com/@g0vTW
They happen every two months. Some people have started g0v chapters abroad, maybe you could consider it for your region!
Practically all corporate backed or organized ones are more or less lots of job interview tasks running in parallel, so they get lots of work for free on a problem they really should've paid people to solve, and get to pick the result they like most. I've always found the idea too exploitative to ever join.
You are not alone. MBAs found APIs. Eternal September and all that.