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.
• HackAssistant - Hackathon registration server.
• HackDash - Organize hackaton ideas into a dashboard.
• HackPortal - A platform from HackUTD for user-friendly event management.
• Hibiscus - An all-in-one, plug-and-play hackathon platform, created for HackSC.
• JunctionApp - All-in-one hackathon platform for organisers, maintained by Junction.
• OpenHackathon - Platform with Git-based Cloud Development Environment based on Next.js.
• 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.

Unmaintained 🧊

These projects, while open source, are currently not showing signs of active development. Please contact us if you think otherwise! They might need your help, or have valuable content that could be reused.

• Find Hackathon - A Cross-Platform Mobile Application for finding Hackathons.
• Hackathon Manager - All-in-one platform for hackathon registration & logistics.
• Hackfoldr - Organize gdoc and hackpad documents for hackathons.
• Quill - A registration system designed especially for large hackathons, maintained by HackMIT.
• LaraHack - Administration system designed especially for hackathons and similar competitions.
• Ninjathon - Hackathon managing platform.
• VersusVirus App - For managing teams at large online hackathons.

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.
• Hack2Skill hosts events on their own platform and shares resources for technology innovators.
• 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 enterprise (see also: RHOK, Jr. and RHOK CPH).
• 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. See also the Guides listed further down, which cover many of the same topics.

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.
• Planning Kit - Get information about how to design a hackathon that fits your needs.

Promoting

• Hackathon Sponsorship 🕶️ A crowdsourced ‘Awesome List’ of companies to contact.
• Hackalist - A list of upcoming hackathons from around the world.
• Hack Club - A curated list of hackathons organized for high schoolers.
• Open Source Events - This website contains a monthly calendar of events and hackathons.
• Upcoding - Get event details of competitive programming contests, hackathons etc.

Teambuilding

• Dridbot - Multiplatform chatbot, for pepping up the experience for participants and organizers of hackathons.
• Steps to Building an Effective Team - A bullet-point list from UC Berkley.
• Team Builder for MS Teams - Sample app that allows hackathon participants to form a team based on challenges they want to tackle.
• Team building activities - 64 fun ideas from SessionLab.

Coaching

• HELPq - Queue application with interfaces for mentors and hackers to answer/submit questions, respectively.
• Hangar - A Slack bot to help with judging and coaching at hackathons.
• 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.
• Leadership & Governance - Handbook for open source project, that also applies well for hackathon teams.

Evaluating

• @CivicWhitaker Anthology - Evaluates three years of organizing hackathons in Chicago civic tech.
• Eventflare’s Journal - Strategies for determining criteria & recruiting judges.
• 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.
• GitHub Guide to Hackathons - Join a community connected by code, with tips & tricks from GitHub.
• Hackathon Guidelines - Opendata.ch - Principles for hackathons from the Swiss open data community.
• Hackathon Hackers Guide - Collection of high quality hackathon resources. See also Etiquette and Subgroups.
• Hackathon.guide - A step-by-step guide by seasoned organizer Joshua Tauberer.
• Hackathon Leitfaden - (In German) Printed guide for municipalities.
• Hackday Manifesto - How to make your event a success, and avoid common pitfalls.
• hack.athon.uk - A wiki for helping hackers get into hackathons and organise them!
• Handbuch Jugend-Hackathons - (In German) An in-depth guide to organizing youth events.
• 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 read the guidelines first. Make sure to provide a name, link, description, in alphabetical order, in the appropriate section. Don’t worry about making a mistake: your Pull Request will be an opportunity to discuss and make amends.

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