Hackathon Rules & Guidelines

Eligibility

All participants must have a GitHub account. Teams may consist of 1 to 5 members. Each team may submit only one solution per challenge. Organizers and judges may not submit solutions.

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Submission Types

Challenge Submissions

• Must define a clear, solvable problem with measurable success criteria
• Must be submitted during the Registration phase
• Organizers may edit or reject challenges that do not meet quality standards

Idea Submissions

• Must reference a specific Challenge by issue number
• Must be submitted before the Idea Submission deadline
• Ideas are optional — you may submit a Solution without a prior Idea

Solution Submissions

• The project repository must be public on GitHub
• All code must have been written during the hackathon period (prior open-source libraries are permitted)
• README.md must include setup and run instructions
• Submissions close at 11:59 PM UTC on the final day
• You may update your submission (edit the issue) until the deadline

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Judging Criteria

All solutions are scored on five dimensions, each worth 0–10 points (50 total):

Dimension	Weight	Description
Innovation	20%	Novelty of the approach — how creatively does it solve the problem?
Technical Quality	20%	Code quality, architecture decisions, completeness of implementation
Documentation	20%	Clarity of README, setup guide, and in-code documentation
Feasibility	20%	Realistic path to production; evidence of working prototype or MVP
Impact	20%	Potential real-world benefit and scalability

Evaluation Process

1. Automated scoring — GitHub Actions triggers the GitHub Models API (GPT-4o) to score each submission using the rubric above. Scores appear as a comment on the submission issue within ~2 minutes.
2. Human review — Judges review AI scores for all finalist submissions and may adjust rankings.
3. Winner selection — The select-winners workflow is run by organizers with human approval required via the Results environment gate.

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AI Tools & Attribution

Participants may use AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, etc.) in their solutions.
AI usage must be disclosed in the submission under Technical Implementation.
AI-generated code without attribution is grounds for disqualification.

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Code of Conduct

All participants must adhere to the GitHub Community Guidelines. Violations may result in disqualification.

Intellectual Property

• Participants retain full ownership of their submitted work.
• By submitting, participants grant the organizers the right to showcase their work publicly (on the leaderboard, in release notes, and on social media).
• All submitted code must be original work or properly licensed open-source components.

Disputes & Appeals

If you believe your evaluation scores are incorrect, open a GitHub Discussion in the Appeals category within 48 hours of score publication. Describe which dimension you believe was scored incorrectly and why. Organizers will review and may trigger a re-evaluation.

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Disqualification

A submission may be disqualified for:

• Code submitted before the hackathon start date
• Plagiarized or unlicensed third-party code without attribution
• Code of Conduct violations
• Incomplete submission (missing public repo, no README)
• Coordinated manipulation of the evaluation system

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Questions? Ask in GitHub Discussions → Q&A.