Awesome Hackathon

A curated open list of platforms and tools that can help you to organize and run tolerant and productive hackathons.

This list tries to cover what is ⚡️awesome⚡️ about hackathons, hackdays and hacknights, and the community of organizers who run them! If you are looking for tools to use as a participant of a hackathon, see Awesome Hackathon Starters. To enhance this list, please refer to the Contributing section.

Contents

• Platforms
• Tooling
• Guides

Platforms

By awesome hackathon platforms, we mean web or mobile applications that are specifically designed to run a hackathon, or which have effectively adapted for use in events of this type. They typically allow organizers to announce the schedule and topics, register participants, and document the results.

Open Source

These can be run with a cloud provider or self-hosted, to take full control of the data. Being open source efforts, they typically embrace open standards. Several are developed by non-profits and volunteer communities.

• Dribdat - Hackathons with impact, based on open data and web standards.
• HackDash - Organize hackaton ideas into a dashboard.
• Hackfoldr - Organize gdoc and hackpad documents for hackathons.
• JunctionApp - All-in-one hackathon platform for organisers, maintained by Junction.
• Quill - A registration system designed especially for large hackathons, maintained by HackMIT.
• VersusVirus-App - For managing team building at large online hackathons, currently unmaintained.
• Civic Tech Exchange - Online platform for Democracy Lab projects.

Closed Source

Despite having a presence on GitHub, the core sources of these applications are at this time closed (🔒).

• Agorize - A French company that provides open innovation software.
• Devfolio - Supporting India's 'largest and fastest growing community of builders'.
• Devpost - U.S. company whose customers market developer tools and jobs to the community.
• TAIKAI - Connects creators and companies, using hackathons, bounties and hiring challenges.

Organisations

Companies that provide products and services for, or regularly organise, hackathons.

• Eventornado provides an all-in-one platform for organising a hackathon.
• Hackathon.com from BeMyApp Corporation promotes events globally, and offers commercial services.
• HackerEarth is a commercial platform for sourcing, assessing, interviewing, and upskilling developers.
• HYPE provides software to help idea and innovation managers collect and manage ideas.
• Mercer | Mettl sees hackathons as a tool for building tech teams and fostering collaboration.
• Microsoft sponsors and organises hackathons, and offers advice for using their products to run an event.
• Random Hacks of Kindness was a global hackathon series for charities, non-profits and social enterprises, whose spin-offs like RHOK, Jr. and RHOK CPH are still active.
• Tulula runs online competitions and hackathons based on an online platform.
• Unstop provides virtual event platforms to organize hackathons and coding tests.

Tooling

These are frameworks, utilities and online tools for solving a variety of issues that hackathon organizers commonly face. They often have some way of integrating with the platforms above.

Promoting

• Hackalist - A list of upcoming hackathons from around the world.

Organizing

• BoilerBot - Take control of your Slack by creating groups, assigning tasks, and more.
• Hubot-RedisRed - As well as hubot-group, hubot-conf, hubot-shortcut by HackMIT are Hubot plugins to make organizing easier.

Teambuilding

• Dridbot - Chat bot built on the Hubot framework, for pepping up the experience for participants and organizers of hackathons.

Coaching

• HackMIT-HELPq - Queue application with interfaces for mentors and hackers to answer/submit questions, respectively.
• Treehacks-MentorBot - Slackbot that provides mentors a channel to claim help requests and attendees to submit help requests within slack. Queues requests in a #mentors channel.

Evaluating

• Expo Table app - Create a Devpost Expo table frontend.
• Gavel - A project expo judging system by HackMIT that uses fancy math to get good results.

Guides

These are helpful handbooks and articles that will give you some orientation, and help you to prepare a plan for organizing your event.

• Dribdat wiki - Community sourced guidelines from an open source project.
• Hackathon Hackers Guide - Collection of high quality hackathon resources.
• Hackathon.guide - A step-by-step guide by seasoned organizer Joshua Tauberer.
• Hackathon Leitfaden - (In German) Printed guide for municipalities.
• Handbuch Jugend-Hackathons - (In German) An in-depth guide to organizing youth events.
• Opendata.ch Guidelines - A short principled list for open data hackathons from the Swiss community.
• Mattermost Handbook - Practical guidelines from the open source Mattermost chat server.
• McKinsey: Demystifying the hackathon - For digital transformation of large organizations.
• Mediawiki Handbook - Suggestions from the Mediawiki community (which powers Wikipedia).
• MLH Organizer Guide - Guide from Major League Hacking, popular at US schools.
• OpenDataLab.eu Handbook - Open 4 Citizens hackathon handbook from an EU project.
• Ultimate Ethereum Hackathon Survival Guide - From a popular Web3 community.

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Please only suggest tools if they are actively maintained. Read the contribution guidelines first for other details. Make sure to provide a name, link, description, in alphabetical order. There is a strong preference on open source and open access, but please mark any awesome yet closed-source tools or articles behind paywalls with a lock icon (🔒).

Footnotes

This repo is made with generator-awesome-list by Darshak Parikh and :heart: motivated by awesome-hackathons by Camille Considine.

Licensed CC0 - Creative Commons Public Domain