Need some resources for your hackathon? Check out all our resources below. This is by no means an exhaustive list. We hope you find it useful.
Whether you’re running an in-person hackathon, online, or even hybrid, here’s 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Obviously 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”.
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.
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. This is a great resource if you’re looking to send your customers/clients to hackathons. There’s featured hacks from all over the globe. There’s also opportunities for you to have your hackathon featured on the website too. Their site also has a blog with lots of tips and tricks on running a hackathon too.
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 Extership 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.
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 apge. 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.
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 plaforms 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 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.
