[occam65]

I love the focus on a particular topic or theme. "Reduce code fat!" for example. I've been to far too many general hackathons where the scope was so broad that the productivity of the hackathon itself was minimal, or even zero.

[TallGuyShort]

Is the goal of those broad hackathons not to encourage new ideas rather than make bulk progress on a pre-defined roadmap?

[d33]

The question is though: would you prefer a) a half-baked feature where coding is 1/10th of the effort and you're still left with 9/10th of the work for the maintainer/community or b) a small, but undeniable improvement?

[TallGuyShort]

OpenBSD would obviously prefer the latter, but other hackathons are sometimes for the purpose of just generating new ideas or getting new people involved - in those cases broad scope is good and intentional.