In my experience, "hackathon" can refer to two very different sorts of events: hacking marathons (such as jacobsHack), where participants tend to work overnight to accomplish something amazing in a limited time; and hacker weekends (such as Hac Phi), where participants work on projects, socialize, and then (presumably) rest at night.
In fact Zurihack felt pretty much like a coding marathon, I'm not sure if the "not sleeping" thing should be considered as part of the definition of a hackathon...
> I'm really not sure what the best noun to use is, but I'm leaning towards
> describing it as a mini convention or conference.
I agree that hackathon has come to mean something else. But mini-convention or conference doesn’t really capture the semi-spontaneous character of it, and something like “community hack” or “meetup” or “hacker weekend” doesn’t capture that really lots of people do just show up and code all weekend long. “unconference and skillshare” maybe, but that’s sort of goofy…
perhaps “community hackathon” to capture both the ground-up unstructured character, and the fact that it centers around (no matter what else is going on) lots of people with computers, talking about and writing code in small groups?
-g