News
Countdown running
September 16, 2008 - The countdown is running: In little more than a week the Hackontest competition begins! The flights of the nine participants are booked, the visas organized, the container about to be installed, so things seem to be pretty much ready. Everyone is welcome to visit the hackers in the tank at the OpenExpo in Winterthur, Switzerland (see Google Map or directions on the OpenExpo website). The event takes place starting from September 24, 2008 10h CET until September 25, 2008 10h CET. The presentation of prizes will take place the same day at 16.30h at the OpenExpo venue. For those of you who don't have the chance to get to the location physically, we're preparing some virtual connections to the programmers such as webcam and chat channel on this website.
Participants of Hackontest selected
August 7, 2008 - The open source projects and participants of the Hackontest event in September are selected! The jury chose Igor Novikov, Darya Shumilina and Vladimir Korenev of sK1, Ingo Renner, Oliver Hader and Dmitry Dulepov of TYPO3 and Albert Zeyer, Karel Petranek and Sergiy Pylypenko of OpenLieroX. CONGRATULATIONS!
Jury is evaluating projects and programmers to select for Hackontest participation
August 1, 2008 - Tonight the selection phase of the Hackontest was over, therefore voting on feature requests has been disabled. The jury is currently looking at the community ratings and at the profiles of the implementers in order to decide for the nine participating programmers. The selected teams will be announced somewhen next week.
code_swarm animations of top five open source projects
July 26, 2008 - One of the goals of Hackontest is to visualize the enthusiastic development activity within open source projects to 'normal' people. A new open source animation tool, code_swarm written by Michael Ogawa, does exactly this as well: It animates the Subversion activity of open source projects. Thus we decided to create code_swarm animations of the top 5 projects on hackontest.org: sk1, TYPO3, OpenLieroX, phpMyAdmin, and Inkscape. Thus everyone can now see how lively the development is and who's involved in the respective projects. Have fun and enjoy the videos! (also available as HD-resolution downloads at hackontest.org/media)
Only top ten feature requests are summed up
July 25, 2008 - It was the intention to provide incentives to create and vote for several feature requests. However, not only the number of ranked features shall determine the selection of projects but also their popularity needs to be taken in account. Therefore we now sum up only the top 10 ready to implement features in order to create the readiness ranking.
Short video clip about Hackontest
July 23, 2008 - A 30sec video clip for Swiss local television was recorded to explain briefly to the public what Hackontest is about. (sorry international visitors, dialogue is in Swiss German)
Change of rules: no negative votes possible anymore
July 16, 2008 - Sorry for changing the rules so late, but demoting features lead to unexpected distortions in the competition. Thus we decided to remove the down-grade button and neutralize the negative votes.
High activity because of media publications and project participation
July 15, 2008 - Barely 16 days are left till the selection process ends on August 1st, 2008 at 00:00h CET. Activity has increased lately because of various announcements such as on heise open or typo3.org. Now we've created the possibility to see all the implementers of a project by clicking 'List of Implementers'. Also a little log shows the recent changes on the projects and features.
Which projects are ready to participate in Hackontest?
July 3, 2008 - One month is left for the selection process which ends on August 1st, 2008 at 00:00h CET. Thus the Hackontest team has created a new sorting method called 'readiness'. It filters all the projects leaving only those which have at least one feature request with at least three implementers. Then the sorting method orders this set of projects by the sum of rankings of these 'ready' features. This means projects with more and higher ranked ready-to-implement features get a greater chance to participate. The three best ones are always displayed in the new 'Snapshot of Selection' box.
Newsletter: One month left for Hackontest selection process
July 3, 2008 - Thank you for participating in the Hackontest selection process! Because of your great activity during the last months there are today 51 open source projects registered with over 150 suggested features rated almost 2000 times by 485 different persons! Some of you have really done a fabulous job in showing enormous commitment and promoting your project heavily in your community sites.
ONE MONTH LEFT TO PUSH YOUR PROJECT
Now this month will decide which three projects and which nine developers will participate in the Hackontest event. On ***August 1st, 2008 at 00:00h CET*** we will take a snapshot of the Hackontest database. Based on that, the jury will decide who will get a travel ticket to Switzerland this September. It's a two-stage process to get selected for Hackontest: First your project has to be chosen, and second, you as implementer of certain features need to get accepted.
HOW TO GET YOUR PROJECT ACCEPTED
Today we have programmed a new sorting method of the projects. It's called 'readiness'. First it filters all the projects leaving only those which have at least one feature request with at least three implementers. (As you can see, out of the 51 active projects currently only six fulfill this minimum criteria in order to participate in the Hackontest event!) Second the sorting method orders this set of projects by the sum of rankings of these 'ready' features. This means projects with more and higher ranked ready-to-implement features get a greater chance to participate. Therefore, we suggest you do it e.g. like sK1 (by far the highest ranked project at the moment) and put a Hackontest banner on the front page of your project's website so everyone interested in your project votes for you on hackontest.org.
HOW TO GET ACCEPTED AS HACKER
Once your project has been chosen, the jury will select the three most promising programmers of the project. This will be done mostly by looking at the experience and skills of the persons. Therefore we suggest that you update your Hackontest profile, write what you've done for your project, fill in all the possible information and link to a nice picture of you. Like this, the jury members will get an easy overview of you as a person and can better choose the best people of your project. Of course we can't measure these characteristics automatically. Thus for the new 'Snapshot of Selection' box on the right side of hackontest.org we took the three persons who are willing to implement the most features - which indicates they are the most 'flexible' programmers of the community.
OK, we hope everything is clear now how this last mile of the Hackontest selection process works. If not, please let us know and send an email to contact@hackontest.org
We wish you all the best and lots of positive ratings for your project!
Matthias Stuermer and Emanuel Indermuehle
Hackontest on Google's Open Source Blog
May 2, 2008 - Today we published a post on Google's Open Source Blog about how Hackontest works. Meanwhile some stats: By now there are 34 registered projects, 180 users, 57 feature requests and 289 feature ratings. And over 6000 unique visitors per day!
Rumors about dead hackers in sarcophagus...
April 22, 2008 - Feedback on our announcement on Slashdot is huge. Although our server didn't break, there are some funny reactions resulting in a conspiracy theory - everything because of a wrong link... So don't be afraid, there won't be any dead hackers despite 24h coding and Hackontest doesn't take place within the SARCOPHAGUS, it's just a regular etoy.TANK ;)
April 18, 2008 - Can you code 24 hours non-stop? Hackontest is a new Google-sponsored 24-hour programming competition between different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance Free Software projects according to user needs and to make visible how enthusiastically open source software is being developed. During the current online selection process users and developers of open source software may submit feature requests and rate and comment them. On Swiss national holiday August 1st, 2008 the Hackontest jury will pick the three most promising teams. They receive a free trip to Switzerland on September 24/25, 2008 to participate in the competition located at OpenExpo 2008 Zurich. Hacking 24 hours inside an etoy.TANK, the teams and their virtually present communities will implement certain features based on the online ratings and jury selection. In the end, the Hackontest jury evaluates the code and awards the winners with a total of USD 8500. The jury is made up of 10 renowned open source contributors: Jeremy Alison (Samba), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu), Brian W. Fitzpatrick (Subversion), Martin F. Krafft (Debian), Alexander Limi (Plone), Federico Mena-Quintero (GNOME), Bram Moolenaar (vim), Bruce Perens (OSI founder), Lukas K. Smith (PHP) and Harald Welte (gpl-violations.org).
Press release: Open source programming competition Hackontest started
April 3, 2008 - The Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open organizes the first international Hackontest sponsored by Google as part of informatica08, the Swiss year of computer science 2008. Hackontest is a 24-hour programming competition of three teams of different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance popular Free Software projects according to user needs and to demonstrate to the public how enthusiastically open source software is being developed.
Starting in April 2008 users and developers of open source software may submit feature requests for their favorite Free Software projects and rate and comment them. On Swiss national holiday August 1st, 2008 the Hackontest jury will pick the three most promising teams. They may travel to Switzerland on September 24/25, 2008 to participate in the competition located at the OpenExpo Zürich 2008. The jury is staffed of ten highly renowned open source hackers such as Jeremy Alison (founder of Samba), Bruce Perens (founder of the Open Source Initiative), Alexander Limi (founder of Plone), Harald Welte (founder of gpl-violations.org) and Jono Bacon (Ubuntu community leader).
The Hackontest platform and further information about the event is located at www.hackontest.org