This will be your first opportunity to collaborate with the other fellows in your Pod on a software project and put some of what you’ve been learning into practice! 

You’ll use Git & GitHub best practices to build an Open Source project that utilizes at least one of the technologies that your Pod will be contributing to during the program.

By the end of this session, you should accomplish the following:

  1. Familiarized yourself with at least one of your Pod’s Open Source projects
  2. Practiced collaborating on a project on GitHub using best practices
  3. Expanded your network by collaborating with fellows from your Pod

 

Timeline

The Orientation Hackathon takes place during your first week of the fellowship. The kickoff will take place at the end of your first Pod meeting and demos will take place at the beginning of your first meeting during your second week. If your Pod meets on Tuesdays & Thursdays at 1pm, that means you'll have from 4pm on the first Tuesday until 1pm on the next Tuesday to work on your project.

 

  • Orientation Hackathon Kickoff – During this event, we’ll reveal the “secret ingredient” (your Pod’s Open Source projects) and help you form teams of 2-3 fellows.

  • Hacking – Between the end of your orientation hackathon kickoff and the beginning of your hackathon demos, you should be collaborating with your team on your hackathon project.

  • Hackathon Pod Demos – All of your Pod Leader's Pods will come together to show off their projects during a series of live demos on Zoom. Your Pod Leader will select a winning project from each Pod to move on to the global finals.

Eligibility

You must be an Open Source Fellow of the MLH Fellowship (Batch 1) in order to be eligible to participate.

Requirements

As you know, you have until the beginning of your hackathon demos to work on your project. As part of your submission, you’ll need to complete the following:

  1. Publish your project on GitHub with an appropriate Open Source license

  2. Record a 3-5 minute video overview and demo of your project.

  3. Submit the team questionnaire about your project

Publishing Your Project on GitHub

Before demos the repository should be set to public and should have an appropriate README and LICENSE included. One of the criteria that you will be evaluated on is your use of Git and GitHub best practices, so also try to make sure your commit history is visible on the repository.

Recording Your Video Demo

A day or so before the Demos you should plan to record a video demo of your project. While you’ll do a live demo with your Pod, the videos will be shared with the full fellowship, and the judges for the global competition will see the videos from the top team from each Pod.

During this video demo (and probably your live demo too) you should aim to cover the following key pieces of information. 

Submission Form

A few hours before your hackathon demos start, we’ll share the link for the submission form. The form will ask you for the following information about your project:

  • Project Name & Tagline - The name of your project and a 1-2 sentence tagline describing it.

  • Project Overview – A more detailed written description of the project. Aim for 3-5 paragraphs about the problem you were trying to solve, how you approached it, and what you built.

  • Open Source Projects Used – A list of any Open Source technologies you used when building the project, including any not officially being supported by your Pod.

  • Pod Number and Team Member Names – Your Pod’s number and a list of your team members.

  • GitHub URL - The URL on GitHub where we can find the code.

  • Video Upload / Link – Either upload the raw file or provide a URL where we can download the video. We will need a copy of the file as the final demos will be livestreamed.

Full page can be found here.

 

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

3 non-cash prizes
1st Place Team
1 winner

Amazon Echo Dot, Digital E Book, Spotify Premium for 1 Month, MLH Season T-Shirt, MLH Fellowship Stickers, Certificate

2nd Place Team
1 winner

Digital E Book, Spotify Premium for 1 Month, MLH Season T-Shirt, MLH Fellowship Stickers, Certificate

3rd Place Team
1 winner

Digital E Book, MLH Season T-Shirt, MLH Fellowship Stickers, Certificate

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

TBC

TBC
TBC

Judging Criteria

  • Technology
    How technically impressive was the hack? Was the technical problem the team tackled difficult? Did it use a particularly clever technique or did it use many different components? Did the technology involved make you go "Wow"?
  • Design
    Did the team put thought into the user experience? How well designed is the interface? For a website, this might be about how beautiful the CSS or graphics are. For a hardware project, it might be more about how good the human-computer interaction is?
  • Completion
    Does the hack work? Did the team achieve everything they wanted?
  • Learning
    Did the team stretch themselves? Did they try to learn something new? If a team which always does virtual reality projects decides to switch up and try doing a mobile app instead, that exploration should be rewarded.
  • Open Source Best Practices
    Did the team apply the Open Source best practices including, but not limited to, use of branches, pull requests, reviewing each other’s code, writing a comprehensive README, and using issues to track tasks.

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

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