Attracting the right talent to hackathons on coding platforms

Abstract

This paper seeks to study the correlation between various parameters of online hackathons and their participation levels. The data used to study this correlation is derived from TopCoder website across the three domains of hackathons hosted i.e. Design , Coding and Data Science. Data of competitions attempted by the top performers of each category was retrieved and the participation levels of those top performers in those competitions was studied by bucketing this data w.r.t. prize money and total number of fellow contestants. The optimal range of prize money to ensure maximum participation from top performers was determined across the three domains and the strength of correlation was established between participation by top performers and number of fellow contestants in the competition.