Concerning judging, I advise everyone to… just drop it! We started dropping it when we launched Museomix[1] as it made no sense for the mood and culture we wanted to create: inclusive, cross-disciplinary, community building oriented.

Back in 2010 and 2011 with the first ArtGame Weekends we had a jury and a small money prize. Most people didn't in fact care for both of them: it was just not an integral part of what motivated them.

On the other hand, jury and competition induce several issues. One is explicitly stating from the get go that only some teams and projects will have merits. Another one is falsely relying on the prizes as the solution to what happen next (we gave you 5000€, now go build v1).

Jury and winners in hackathons are event a PR trap! With a winner, you now have to focus your post-event PR solely on the winner, loosing the possibilities of picking and talking about the right project to the right person.

So, I now advise my community friends and my corporate clients to not have a jury in their hackathons, but to instead have, for example, a Mentor panel. They are not there to elect a winner, but to close the event, create a demo goal, and most importantly use their knowledge of the ecosystem(s) to trace a path for the teams to pursue their project (by for example referring them to the right persons or organizations).

One of my very clever client decided she would instead of having a single prize just give away all the tech she bought for the participants to hack with during the event -- using what would have been prize money! Estimotes, micro video projectors, WeIO and Arduino boards… to all participants. ("Come back home with your project"). It makes sense, and can cost the same. [3]

In a Museomix edition the reward is intrinsic: you live, build and show your prototype directly in a museum for 3 days. And everyone get to share this reward, organizers included!

As collective / co-creative events organizers, ask yourself if you really need to add more selective competition in a world where there is already so much of it, and ask yourself if having a jury really align with the culture you want to create. Do you want to create/mimic an academic/school culture? If not then maybe you just don't need jury.

[1] http://museomix.org/en [2] http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2011/05/art-game-w... [3] http:/cultureexperiencedays.adami.fr

I wanted to say something very similar about the judging. At hackathons with prizes the criteria really needs to be very clear upfront and strictly adhered to. Everyone works really hard during the event, and if the attendees feel the judging is poor, people will leave upset. For example, if people think a working prototype is important, and the judges instead go with a polished presentation with nothing behind it, that can be very frustrating.

"...weren't built ahead of time." Where's the line for this? Surely I'd be permitted to reuse libraries (that I've written; that I got from github; whatever) and perhaps the "project" is a smattering of glue. Am I disqualified because 99% was written "ahead of time"?

libraries are fine of course. in higher profile and more competitive hackathons, i've seen quite a few teams who complete the whole project (or re-use the same project from another hackathon).