Judging Criteria

Teams will be judged on these four criteria. Judges will weigh the criteria equally. During judging, participants should try to describe what they did for each criterion in their project.

-Technology: How technically impressive was the hack? Was the technical problem the team tackled difficult? Did you find a new use for, or leverage, an existing piece of technology? Did the technology involved make you go "Wow"?

-Innovation: How innovative and groundbreaking was the idea? Did it use a particularly clever technique or did it use many different components?

-Open-source: Does your project live on GitHub/Bitbucket? Is it open? Did you leverage other great techniques that already exist? We encourage you to develop an app that can easily be used by others.

-Learning: Did the team stretch themselves? Did they try to learn something new? Which technologies/APIs/products/methods did you use, that you didn't know before?

-Teamwork & Collaboration: We encourage you to have colorful teams. As such we will give points to teams that are not solely formed by coworkers. After all, we want to use this time to make new connections too.

-These criteria will guide judges but ultimately judges are free to make decisions based on their gut feeling of which projects are the most impressive and most deserving.

It's important to note that these judging criteria do not include:

-How good your code is. It doesn't matter if your code is messy, or not well commented, or uses inefficient algorithms. Hacking is about playing around, making mistakes, and learning new things. If your code isn't production ready, we're not going to mark you down.

-How well you pitch. Hacking is about building and learning, not about selling.

-How good the idea is. Again, hackathons aren't about coming up with innovative ideas. It's about building and learning.

-How well the project solves a problem. You can build something totally useless and as long as you're learning and having fun, that's a good hack! Sometimes a pointless project is one of the best hacks!

So don't worry about coming up with the next big idea, you'll have plenty of time for that outside the hackathon. just focus on learning, having fun, and making new friends. At the end of the day the skills you learn and the friends you make might lead to the next big thing—but you don't have to do that to win a hackathon.