Background: Time-bounded collaborative events are events that bring together different participants to address a problem through the creation of a computational artifact over a short period of time. Examples of these events include hackathons, game jams, and ideathons. Despite previous research on these events, little is understood about how people seek and get help during these events. Aims: Our goal is to understand how event participants seek and get help during time-bounded collaborative events to design better strategies supporting search behaviour. This is necessary because participants learn and improve different skills important for working in the industry during these events. Method: We conducted a mixed-methods study where we collected data through a large-scale survey with participants of a global-scale game jam. Our primary method was quantitative, but we had a qualitative dataset that we used to augment aspects of our quantitative results. Results: Our findings suggest that professional and independent developers are the ones who provide help most often, while students interact more with mentors. In addition, the frequency that participants getting help from mentors decreases with increased experience in game development and the number of participations in game jams. Participants also point to mentors as an essential part of the jams: they are expert facilitators, so much so that the perception of the mentors' absence or distance was reported as a disappointment. Conclusions: Understanding how participants in time-bounded collaborative events seek and get help is important to design more effective events and improving the participants' overall experience. We translate our findings into suggestions for event organizers.

The present study analyses the direct effects of the technological adoption model (TAM) in the banking sector by meta-analytical structural equation modelling (MASEM). A systematic review of 142 studies was conducted. Through this meta-analysis, we identify the main direct, mediating and moderating relationships. The results pointed to a stronger relationship of self-efficacy in the TAM and a partial mediator relationship of attitude in the relationship between TAM and the intention to use technology. We argue that studies that measure TAM using a greater number of variables, in countries with higher levels of human development and of a Western nature, and with higher levels of Internet connectivity and numbers of active cell phones, have a stronger relationship between ease of use and attitude towards technology. Finally, we also detected a stronger relationship of Internet banking users in the relationship between the TAM dimensions and attitudes toward using electronic banking platforms.

Managers need to decide on how they will configure their virtual teams each time a new project starts. So questions such as 'Which countries should be involved in the project?' and 'How large should the team size be?' need to be answered before hand. Project configurations are known to affect communication, coordination and collaboration aspects of a project, and as a consequence, its performance. Therefore, a challenge managers face is knowing which configurations promote better project outcomes when working with virtual software teams. This article reveals a set of configurations that have promoted the quality of software products developed by virtual teams to support the business of a Fortune 500 large IT multinational company. These configurations can be used as a guideline by managers to set up their own virtual teams. Recommendations on how to set up virtual teams based on the study are then suggested.