FOSS Hack Rules

Hackathon
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What you can work on

  • A new FOSS app, tool, library
  • An alternative to any existing popular app or service
  • Extend, improve an existing project or library
  • Design Projects: Redesign of an existing FOSS application
  • Open hardware

What you should (probably) not work on

  • An app or project that extensively uses proprietary service or API
  • Yet another Keras model on available datasets
  • A simple CRUD application

Evaluation

  • License: Must have a valid Open Source license (https://opensource.org/licenses)
  • Communication: README and Video Demo are very important - this will be the first elimination. Before we look at your code, we will look at your README, so please explain clearly what your project does and how to install it, test it, use it
  • Completeness: Project must be complete and working
  • Design and Aesthetics: If you are making a user interface, make sure it is clean and uses modern UI standards
  • Timeframe: The app must be reasonably built within the given timeframe. The judgement of the jury will be final in this.
  • Credits: If you are using existing code, make sure you credit it. Please don’t copy / plagiarize existing projects. Unfortunately too many people do this.

How to Participate

  • Sign up on the fossunited.org Portal
  • Create your project or join your team
  • Add your project description

On the day of the hackathon:

  • Add your project repo
  • Add / update your readme
  • Add your project updates

Prizes

  • The total prize money will be divided among the best projects
  • The number of projects to be awarded and amount to be given will be decided by the jury after seeing the depth and quality of projects
  • Money will be transferred to the winners individually via NEFT only.
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The rules should state the time duration, start and end dates of sorts too?

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@KrutikaT please give a look to this → https://fossunited.org/hackathon/rules#timing

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I have a suggestion @rushabh.
The evaluation must also include code quality checkup, PR and commit messages quality. I have seen many newcomers(on GitHub or on any other platforms) write poor commit messages even though they persist good programming skills

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Yep. Added this under “Communication”.

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Thank you @knadh for the response.

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I have a doubt related to the above point. Is there any limitation that participants have to work on only a single project during the hackathon or are they allowed to contribute to/create multiple projects?

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@knadh I have couple of queries:

  • Can we use Dynamo DB for our use case, we will mostly be using free version of it ?
  • Can we leverage Zerodha API to create some app around it ?
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I guess this is okay, but not sure why you would when there are a number of FOSS databases (SQL and NoSQL) available

Depends on what the application does. If it’s sole purpose is to wrap external APIs, it could never be a standalone project, and therefore, wouldn’t make sense. If it’s an application into which multiple external APIs can be plugged in as optional data sources, I guess that would be okay.

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@knadh We are thinking of creating an intuitive stock comparison tool targeted for Indian market. Can we use Zerodha api to fetch stock information ?

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As long as the tool is standalone and the Zerodha API, amongst other APIs, are treated as pluggable data sources, I guess it should be okay. If the tool’s exists only to function using Zerodha’s proprietary data APIs, it wouldn’t really make sense.

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If it’s sole purpose is to wrap external APIs, it could never be a standalone project, and therefore, wouldn’t make sense.

If one were to build a library that wraps aws-sdk to make interacting with DynamoDB easier, would it be a valid project?

I intend to build a ODM for dynamo in Golang with the larger goal of making it general purpose ODM for all things NoSQL.

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Sure, this would be an interesting project.

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Can you please provide some clarification on what the video should consist of and guidelines to follow?

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Hi @Prakhar_Bhatnagar, You need to submit a video demo of your project before the clock ends (upload on YouTube or any other platform that is accessible to the Jury). Restricted to 3 mins.

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Hi, our project King Converter mainly aims to create a simple-to-use GUI for commandline applications ImageMagick and Ffmpeg for ease of use.

However, one of my teammates were wondering if we would be disqualified for using external APIs, but in our case we’re building on existing libraries (ffmpeg and imagemagick), so this shouldn’t be a problem right?