Hackontest — 24h Open Source Coding Marathon

maemst writes "Can you code 24 hours non-stop? Hackontest is a new Google-sponsored 24-hour programming competition between different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance Free Software projects according to user needs and to make visible how enthusiastically open source software is being developed. During the current online selection process users and developers of open source software may submit feature requests and rate and comment them. On August 1st, 2008 the Hackontest jury will pick the three most promising teams. Each team will receive a free trip to Switzerland on September 24/25, 2008 to participate in the competition located in Zurich. Hacking 24 hours inside an etoy.CONTAINER, the teams and their virtually present communities will implement certain features based on the online ratings and jury selection. In the end, the Hackontest jury evaluates the code and awards the winners with a total of USD 8500. The jury is made up of 10 renowned open source contributors: Jeremy Alison (Samba), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu), Brian W. Fitzpatrick (Subversion), Martin F. Krafft (Debian), Alexander Limi (Plone), Federico Mena-Quintero (GNOME), Bram Moolenaar (vim), Bruce Perens (OSI founder), Lukas K. Smith (PHP) and Harald Welte (gpl-violations.org)."

Re:Enhance?

[Bruce Perens]

Nobody said the judges were being up for 24 hours. In fact, I made sure they knew I wasn't volunteering for sleep deprivation. And I just found out about this strange cyber-morturary container they propose to hold the contest in. Now, we know these things don't always get delivered, but if it does, I want a picture!

Bruce

Re:Enhance?

[modir]

The website states clearly that you have to be in a group of 3 people. So it depends on how you manage the team. Everyone has only to work for 8 or 9 hours if you plan it like this. Then as well from the website: "However, the Hackontest developers may connect to their outside community through chat, SVN, wikis etc. thus enlarging their team size virtually in a unlimited scale." In other words those in the container could only be the team leaders/project managers and those outside program.