Need some resources for your hackathon? Want some more tips and tricks? Check out all our resources below. This is by no means an exhaustive list. We hope you find it useful. Don't forget you can contribute to this repo via a pull request.
Whether you’re running an in-person hackathon, online, or even hybrid, here are some useful tools and resources to help ensure your hackathon is a success. Remember, there are a number of places to promote your hackathon, so promote it in as many places as possible! Check out the Readme file in this repo for some great websites where you can promote your hackathon.
Don't forget to read our own Tips and Tricks document for lots of information on running your hackathon.
You'll find an alphabetical list of resources below. If you'd like to add your own resource to this document, you can. Simply open a pull request. Make sure you follow the contribution guidelines detailed below.
Certifying the participants or giving them digital badges of hackathon is hard enough. Luckily, with Accredible, you are covered. Accredible makes it easy to create beautiful, interactive, digital badges and certificates. This gives you many more features than a traditional paper certificate could: correct misspelled names on your own, download and print a PDF copy, or attach rich evidence like reports or video to substantiate your learning.
The Awesome project curates resources across the open source community, with thousands of lists that you and your participants will find useful to bootstrap their projects. Awesome Hackathon is aimed at the organizers and participants of such events, keeping track of open platforms, tools, guidelines (like this one!) that can boost your event. And you are welcome to contribute your own links and guides to support this community effort.
Developing and executing a hackathon is hard enough without having to worry about branding, graphics, emails, and social media. Luckily, with Canva, you are covered. Get tonnes of graphics for your hackathon promo videos, presentations, social media, emails, and more. You can get started with Canva's free tier, trial Pro for a free 30 days, or use your GitHub Student Developer pack to get 12 months of Canva Pro Tier for free.
Nearly every event nowadays requires a Code of Conduct. If you are looking for a good basis to build your Code of Conduct, check out the GitHub Event Code of Conduct there's also the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct, another great place to start, as well as the open source Code of Conduct.
This resource shows you how to get started with using GitHub Discussions for your community. You might like to use GitHub Discussions for your hackathons; building a community, sharing knowledge, showcasing projects, and more. Community in a box will give you everything you need to enable Discussions for your organisation and how to get started.
DEV is a community of software developers. They help one another out, posting tutorials, information, and collaborating. DEV host an array of hackathons and is a great place to get lots of information on running a hackathon, or a great site to consider hosting your hackathon. The team hold plenty of collaboration hackathons, so if you're a company looking to run a developer focused or writing focused hackathon, then speak to the team at DEV. They'll do all the heavy lifting for you, and in return you'll have your participants creating a lot more content.
DevPost is known as the home for hackathons. Hackathons are featured on there, and there’s a whole host of tips and tricks on running hackathons too. Check out their page for best practices, and even how to promote a hackathon. This is also a great place to consider promoting your hackathon.
DevPost Expo is an open sourced tool for helping filter and distribute table numbers. If you’re running a science-fair, expo style presentation format this is the perfect tool.
Lots of communities run on Discord these days. If you are running a hackathon for a community that already has a Discord presence, you might want to think about adding a Hackathon Template to your Discord server. This template is designed specifically for hackathons. Give it shot.
Dribdat is an open source (MIT licensed) web application that assists teams working playfully on projects with data. Designed to support awesome hackathons, we think of it as a Swiss Army Knife for civic tech. Time-track your events, embed guidelines, put up digital signage, run a project log, progress tracker, integrate prototyping tools, GitHub repositories, open data APIs, and more.
Envato is the digital marketplace for EVERYTHING. You can find lots of great resources for using in videos, making presentations, designing graphics, website templates, and heaps more. There’s lots of free content and some cheap assets as well.
Are you running a virtual hackathon? Want a better way to engage your audience? Gather town is fun way to have virtual conversations, meetings, chats, and even large presentations. It's completely customisable, and super fun... like playing a video game and chatting to your friends. It's the perfect way to break people out of their comfort zone and they won't even feel like they are on a video call.
Gavel is an open sourced judging tool. It was originally built for a hackathon back in 2015 and has been used for heaps of events since then. It’s a great way to get participants voting for their favourite hackathons and can be used for a “People’s Choice” category.
Well, we can’t go past our own amazing developer platform! GitHub is a great way to collaborate on a project, track your progress, manage a project, and more. Check out how to get GitHub for free on our GitHub Teams page. You can also check out our GitHub Docs Pages for heaps of information on using GitHub and how-to guides.
If you’re a student running a hackathon, then why not see if you can get some money to help you out. Through our partnership with Major League Hacking, we offer students $1000 USD to help run a hackathon. Find out more on the GitHub Campus Experts website and click “apply for hackathon grant”.
If you're a teacher or an educational institution looking to run a hackathon, look no further than GitHub Classroom. With Classroom, you get free access to Codespaces and lots of resources. You can manage assignments (or hackathon submissions) in your dashboard, grade hackathons automatically, and provide help to your students.
The new GitHub Issues allows users to manage projects. It's the ultimate tool for organising your hackathon and encouraging participants to manage their hackathon projects. Users can create issues, break them into tasks, track relationships, add custom fields, and more. There's ways to visualise projects as tables or boards, and automate everything with code.
There's lots of documents that go into event planning. Lists, spreadsheets, welcome packs, and more. The good thing is that multiple users of your team can collaborate and add some spices to the docs. You also can share these docs with edit/view access to your audience. It's very easy and secure. Explore it on Google Docs Page.
Use Google Drive as a communication and organizational tool to keep your organisation team on the same page. Don't bother emailing or dropboxing. Use one thing that does it all, from organising your hackathon, to sharing videos after the event.
Are you wanting to run a survey, collect information from participants, or encourage your participants to collect information for their projects, you can’t go past Forms. It’s free and super easy to use. GitHub now also allows you to build HTML-like forms with the new GitHub Issues.
There's going to be lots of meetings and meet-ups during any event. Google Meet have made this easy. Just join via a Google Meet link or create and share a meeting link with your fellow teammates or audience and have some fun. Explore it on Google Meet Page.
The hackathon guide was put together as a guide for running IRL (in person) hackathons. It's a great resource that walks through all the things to consider when running your hackathon, from emailing participants before the event, to booking locations, sorting out workshops, food, sponsorship, and more.
This guide was put together by our friends over at Major League Hacking. They have a lot of useful information on how to run community focused hackathons. There are some resources around budgets, volunteering guides, proposals, sponsorship decks, and more. A lot of the information is not only targeted towards community hackathons, but also very much towards student hackathons. You can even view, edit, and contribute to this guide on GitHub!
From GitHub’s own Hackathon Queen. Mish puts up lots of insights into hackathons, innovation, outcomes, and more. Check out her website for some great inspiration when you’re thinking about running your hackathon.
Hackathons International is a global organisation, started in Melbourne. They have a whole host of hackathons on their website, from all over the world. This is a great resource if you’re looking to send your customers/clients to hackathons. There are opportunities for you to have your hackathon featured on the website. Their site also has a blog with lots of tips and tricks on running a hackathon.
HackerEarth lets you engage or source top developers with hackathons, while also enabling you to assess, interview and upskill them with ease. As a pioneer of conducting hackathons to drive business impact, HackerEarth has a huge amount of experience in conducting and managing hackathons at scale. You can host your hackathons towards a global community of 6 million developers.
This is a super cool place where developers can earn verifiable digital badges for skills, achievements, and all the amazing things you do. If you are running a hackathon, think about offering a Holopin badge to participants and place winners. It's a great way to help developers build their resumes.
IncubateIND is India's largest and fastest-growing community of technology innovators including startups and student innovators. They are conducting lot of workshops, challenges and GitHub Externship program provides attractive stipends and hands on experience.
Event management, marketing automation, and tonnes of analytics is what Localist is. There's custom branding and you can get a lot of insights about your community from the built-in data. It is designed specifically for community events. It's main appeal is the community calendar that allows you to display all the events coming up in your community. This is useful if you're running more than one hackathon and you want your community to see what's available to them.
Worried about how the users will register for your online hackathon event and get notified? We've got you covered. Luma allows you to host delightful events and foster meaningful relationships with events, newsletters, and community analytics.
Find out where all the awesome hackathons are running! There’s a whole bunch of resources, tips, freebies, and more on their website. It’s a must to check out if you’re running a hackathon.
Need a resource for doing great interactive presentations? As an organiser, this is an awesome platform. Use Mentimeter to run live polls, quizzes, word clouds, Q&As and more. Check out all the awesome things you can do to make your sessions more interactive.
If you're looking for a great domain hosting platform, you can't go past Namecheap. Choose from thousands of domain names to host your hackathon event page. If you have the GitHub Developer Pack you can register one free .me domain name for 12 months.
This guide is mostly geared towards people launching Open Source projects, but there's a lot of great information on building a community. This is also a really good resource to point your participants to at the end of the hackathon. The guide can be used if participants in your hackathon want to launch their projects after the hack. Alternatively, if you've discovered some really cool things during the course of organising your hackathon, you can open source your findings! This guide will be perfect for showing off the things you learned.
This platform for hosting virtual events is like playing a first person shooter. You walk around in the virtual space in FPS view and bump into other people. It can be a 2D or 3D space and has a super interactive feel. You can sit together with other people and watch videos, play games like Pacman, go to the bar, hang out in a room or just run around and explore the space. It's perfect in VR too. This would be a great platform for gaming hackathons.
Worried about creating a banner or social media image for advertising your hackathon? Fortunately, Picsart has you covered. It allows users to take and edit pictures and videos, draw with layers, and share the images on Picsart and other social networks.
Another one for the virtual event orgainsers. Remo is a fully online and customisable virtual event experience. This really makes participants feel like they are at a physical hackathon. It has all the features of a real building; elevators, different floors, tables to 'sit' at, and places to watch larger presentations. It's perfect if you want to run with the 'weekend long' format in a virtual setting.
The communication tool of this century! If you don’t have it, you need it. All your comms are easily accessible in one place. Use it to keep track of your organising team and it’s also a great platform for participants to connect and share knowledge. Slack is perfect for both online and offline hackathons.
There's definitely a lot more event platforms around now. Sparkle is an interactive and immersive space for running your virtual events. There are interactive maps, social venues, customisable spaces, chat, video, and more. It's super colourful and great for hosting a hackathon.
An event marketing platform that helps with all virtual, hybrid, and live events. It's mostly an event registration/management platform that pairs nicely if you're already using Zoom, YouTube live, etc. to run your virtual event. You can also use it for IRL events, just don't use the streaming part of it. Splash will help create all your marketing assets like event page, registration form, emails, branded live stream, check-in, stats and more.
If you've never heard about Stack Overflow this is the perfect time to get familiar. This is the place where developers come to learn together. The Q&A Section is probably what you'll want to look at the most. As an organiser, this is the perfect resource to point your participants to when they need answers on pretty much any developer question on the planet.
If you decide to host a virtual hackathon, and you are planning on having multiple presenters/presentations, Streamyard is a fantastic way to host your event. You can bring in multiple presenters on a screen, and it's a pretty good user experience for your speakers. If you have the GitHub Student Developer Pack, you'll get free access to the Streamyard Essential Plan while you are a student.
This is the perfect place to find royalty free stock photos and images. They are great for promoting your hackathon, putting together event sites, and even using for slide shows.
Vercel is a virtual event starter kit. It allows you to fully customise your event to your needs. It runs in any browser without additional downloads and is perfect if you are thinking of hosting a virtual hackathon with presentations and more of an 'event' flair.
Vevox is an interactive word cloud generator, polling, and Q&A app that can be utilised to run live word cloud polls. It can be used in virtual hackathons to engage participants and increase collaboration. Creating and running a live word cloud poll can evoke excitement, and give the participants energy. People can see all their text responses appear on your presentation screen in front of them.
No doubt you’ve now heard about Zoom! It’s essential to use some sort of video conferencing tool when you’re running an offline hackathon with presentations and workshops. Zoom can be used for organisers to host and kick off a hackathon, as well as having participants dial in and present their ideas at the end. Depending on the format for your hackathon you might decide to limit interaction and leave people to their own devices. If you are interacting with people however, you can’t go past Zoom… just remember to set a password to deter “zoom bombers”!
If you would like to add a resource to this document, please open a pull request. Ensure your resource recommendation includes:
- Name of the resource
- Link to the resource (ie. website)
- Short description about the resource
See the above to see how other resources are displayed. Please follow this format otherwise your pull request could be rejected. Ensure your resource is placed in the correct alphabetical order.
Format for adding your resource:
[Name of the Resource in H2 format](with link to website)
Short description, between two and four sentences long. Talk about what the resource is and how it can help organisers. Ensure the link above includes https instead of http.
# you can add an appropriate gif, short video, or image if it suits. However, this is not necessary.
Remember, this resource is for organisers, not participants. If your resource is not for organisers and does not meet the requirements above, your pull request could be rejected.
You can also head to the Discussions to talk about Resources before adding them to this documentation.
