Scientific advancement has always relied on collaboration, yet harnessing the full potential of large interdisciplinary groups remains challenging. The Network Science Institute (NetSI) has turned to Collabathons—structured, multi-day events that blend “collaboration” and “hackathon”—to tackle this challenge while asking complex scientific questions.
The Rise of a New Collaborative Model
The idea of a Collabathon is inspired by large-scale collaborations in fields like cosmology, where hundreds of researchers work together to discover and analyze a new fundamental phenomenon (e.g. the discovery of gravity waves). Drawn to the potential of compressing an intensive research collaboration into a multi-day event, Brennan Klein, NetSI Assistant Teaching Professor, wanted to test this approach in the field of complex systems, where interdisciplinarity is fundamental and makes large-scale collaborations even more challenging.
The inaugural Collabathon designed by Dr. Klein in 2019, was an ambitious experiment: a short-term, large-scale research initiative centered around core network science challenges. Participants worked intensively over three days to identify and implement various techniques for inferring network structures from time series data, while also developing methods to quantify dissimilarities between pairs of networks. Rather than seeking a single "best" technique, the event aimed to characterize and consolidate a fragmented methodological landscape into a unified framework.
Tangible Outcomes and Impact
This initial experiment proved remarkably successful. The collaboration resulted in the creation of the "netrd" Python package, which the team officially released while traveling to the NetSci 2019 conference in Burlington, Vermont. As of the writing of this article, "netrd" has been downloaded over 42,800 times, demonstrating its value to the broader research community.
The philosophy behind the Collabathon was fundamentally infrastructural—creating tools and resources that could offer cross-cutting advances to the discipline of network science. The organizers recognized that while new and better methods would inevitably emerge for reconstructing networks or measuring graph distances, their contribution would serve as valuable consolidation of a previously disorganized methodological space and provide a roadmap for future improvements.
Building a Tradition of Collaborative Research
The success of the initial event established Collabathons as a recurring tradition at NetSI and within the broader network science community. Since 2019, the institute has hosted Collabathons in Portland (Maine) on network rewiring; in Zaragoza (Spain) about coarse-graining networks; and twice in Boston—first, to study competing methods for estimating the effective reproductive number in emerging epidemics, and more recently, during the 2025 Future of Network Science Summit, to organize techniques for coarse-graining networks into a taxonomy that enables better comparison and potential consolidation of methods. The Women in Network Science organization (WINS) has also adopted this model, hosting their own Collabathon at the Network Science Institute in Boston in 2023.
One of the great advantages of Collabathons, that makes them increasingly popular, is their versatility. These intensive, large-scale collaborations can gather researchers with varying levels of experience and from different fields. They can also bring together professionals from across industry, government, academia, and NGOs who share common interests and goals. A recent example is the multi-day Epistorm Rt-Estimate Collabathon 2024, held at Northeastern University, where stakeholders from different sectors of society—administrators, data anlysts, scientists, and health practitioners—met to address a critical public health challenge: the real-time estimation of epidemic growth rates, a key element for effective epidemic forecasting.
The Educational Dimension
Beyond developing research tools and methodologies, Collabathons play a crucial educational role. They provide unique training opportunities for early-career researchers, particularly in navigating the collaborative aspects of scientific research. Participants learn to build effective collaborations with peers from different cultural and academic backgrounds, establishing common scientific language across different areas of expertise. The compacted timeframe of these events—typically spanning just two or three days—forces participants to engage with every aspect of the scientific process, from initial brainstorming and question formulation through analysis and documentation. This compression helps researchers develop both technical skills and the "soft skills" essential for successful scientific collaboration.
The complex systems research community has embraced this method of collaboration. Notably, Complexity72h follows a comparable format, compressing the entire lifecycle of a scientific research project into 72 hours. The Complexity72h founders recently published a vision article outlining their approach, and they continue to organize events, with an upcoming workshop scheduled in Madrid (co-organized by NetSI core faculty member Iacopo Iacopini).
Impact on Research Culture
The Collabathon model represents an innovative approach to addressing the organizational challenges of collaborative research. By providing structured opportunities for intensive collaboration, these events enable researchers to consolidate methodological knowledge, develop shared resources, and train the next generation of scientists in collaborative research practices. NetSI actively encourages participation in these initiatives, particularly among junior scholars.
What began as a one-time experiment has evolved into an institutionalized tradition within NetSI. As an Institute we support collaboration across labs; as a field, this makes us stronger.
