[jarofgreen]

Judging - consider not having any. None at all. You can talk all you want about "collaborative atmosphere" but if your introducing judging then there is going to be friction, and the better prizes there are the more friction there will be. What's most likely to happen is you'll get ppl coming in preset teams who will studiously avoid talking to anyone else all weekend, which can really kill the atmosphere for anyone who actually wants to work with others.

This doesn't mean you can't have prizes. I saw a hackathon where the presentation at the end was just everyone showing off the cool things they made and then they handed out prizes totally at random. It was great.

What this really comes down to is a much wider issue - what do you want your hackathon to achieve? Just tech ppl who hacked round on a new technology and learnt a cool now thing? Actually a new idea for a thing, but with no plan behind it? Should ideas have a business plan behind them? Do you actually want new start ups to form at your hackathon? Whether you have judging, and if so who judges and the criteria you set will be a very large part of this.

[Freeboots]

This would be pretty interesting. Personally, Im super competitive, and I've found most others are too.

About 4 hours from presentations at my first Startup Weekend, we drastically needed to downscale what we were trying to do. I asked my team "Do we want to build this product, or do we want to win?". All of them said "Win."

And so we did. But that app that won Startup Weekend never saw the light of day, so what was the point?

[jarofgreen]

:-)

It all goes back to what the point of the hackathon is really.

For hackathons that are about people actually starting a project and continuing it afterwards (and certainly the Startup Weekend organisers I've talked to locally say this) I think this is the massive blind spot of hackathons - in reality very few projects will continue afterwards. I've seen many things tried to help improve this, and I don't know what the answer is - but I haven't seen anything about the judging helping.

(Edit: congrats on winning tho ... um, after what I've just said!)

[bemmu]

How about peer to peer judging? At the end everyone gives a score on different aspects on say 10 other projects, like in Ludum Dare.

[jarofgreen]

I've never done Ludum Dare, so I'd be curious to see how that worked and what kind of vibes it set up between teams. After all, it's still judging.

[bemmu]

It feels less arbitrary when you have a lot of different people looking at what you made, all of whom also just spent 2-3 days tirelessly toiling on their own projects.

[jarofgreen]

Fair enough, but the fact it can be arbitrary is not my fundamental issue. Why does it need to be judged at all? Why can't they just say "Cool, we all made a game!" and then leave it that? What is achieved by having scores, and bearing mind a lot of ppl are going to be disappointed by bad scores, is it worth it?