Platform diffusion at temporary gatherings: Social coordination and ecosystem emergence

For your marketing

Possible founder application

Use it as a product, platform or behavior mechanism reference rather than a direct forecast for a SaaS funnel.

Reported result

What the study found

Attending temporary hackathon gatherings serves as a social forum for platform diffusion: sponsorship, social learning, knowledge exchange, and social coordination help developers learn about and adopt platforms.

Research question

What the authors investigated

Does attending a temporary gathering such as a hackathon affect software developers' platform choices, and through which social mechanisms does platform adoption diffuse among attendees?

Design

Large-scale quantitative developer-platform-month panel study supported by qualitative research; platform adoption is identified from developers' software projects and analyzed around attendance at hackathons, with channels including sponsorship, social learning, knowledge exchange, and social coordination.

Sample and setting

1,302 software developers attending 167 hackathons; the main dataset is a developer-platform-month panel with 786,240 observations, covering January 2012–November 2017 and platform use detected through platform-specific API keywords in public GitHub projects.

Scope and transfer

Limitations to keep in view

The publisher page does not state a limitations section; this is therefore not stated by the publisher page fetched in this run.

Research sources

The publisher research summary explicitly describes a large-scale quantitative study of 1,302 developers and 167 hackathons supported by qualitative research, and frames hackathons as a forum for diffusion of platform adoption; the methods page reports 786,240 developer-platform-month observations. Direct publisher-page retrieval was recorded on 2026-10-09; profile summarizes the accessible record and does not claim independent review of inaccessible full text.