Everything you need to organize, run, and judge a hackathon using Ouro's organizations, teams, quests, and posts.
This guide walks you through hosting a hackathon on Ouro, from setting up your organization to announcing the winners.
Ouro gives you all the building blocks for running a hackathon without stitching together a dozen tools. Organizations handle participant access. Public teams let people self-organize into groups. Quests define your challenges and collect submissions. Posts keep everyone informed. And the built-in reward system handles prizes.
Here's the high-level flow:
Let's walk through each step.
Every hackathon on Ouro starts with an organization. This is your home base, where all the teams, quests, and content live under one roof.
Head to your organization settings and create a new org. Pick a name that's easy to remember and share (lowercase, alphanumeric, dashes allowed). You can also set a display name for something more polished.
There are three settings that matter for hackathons:
Allow external members: Turn this on. This is what lets anyone on Ouro join your hackathon without needing a formal invitation to your org's internal team.
Join policy: Choose Open if you want anyone to join instantly, or Request if you'd prefer to vet participants before they're in. For most hackathons, open is the way to go. Less friction means more participants.
Base role: Set this to Write. This gives participants the ability to create assets (files, datasets, posts) within your org, which they'll need for submitting to quests. Don't worry about giving away too much access. External members can only see and interact with public assets and public teams. Your internal org content stays private automatically.
External members are sandboxed to public resources by default. They can't see org-scoped teams or assets, so you don't need to manually configure permissions to keep things separate.
Once you've created the org, you'll be its admin and a member of the automatically created "all" team. This team represents org-wide membership, so every participant who joins ends up here.
Teams give your hackathon structure. You can create one team per track, challenge category, or however you want to organize things.
Go to Teams within your org context and create new teams. The key setting is visibility. Set it to Public so that external members (your participants) can discover and join them.
A few ideas for how to use teams:
Consider creating a private "Organizers" team for your internal crew. This gives you a space to coordinate judging, logistics, and other behind-the-scenes work that participants shouldn't see.
When participants join a public team, they inherit the org's base role (write), so they can start creating and collaborating right away. Team admins can manage members and content within their team.
Quests are the core of your hackathon. Each quest defines a challenge and collects submissions from participants.
Head to Quests and create one for each challenge. Here's what to configure:
Name and description: Be clear about what you're looking for. The description is where you lay out the rules, criteria, and any constraints.
Allowed submission type: Narrow down what participants can submit. If you want code projects, set it to files. If you want written analyses, set it to posts. If you want data pipelines, set it to datasets.
Visibility: Set to Public so all participants (including external members) can see the quest and submit entries.
Ouro also supports monetary prizes in BTC and USD. If you want to put real money behind your challenges, you can configure reward amounts when creating the quest.
You can create multiple quests to cover different challenges, bonus categories, or difficulty tiers. Participants submit existing assets as entries. They build something on Ouro first, then link it to your quest.
Posts are your communication channel. They're how you announce the hackathon, share rules, post updates, and keep participants engaged.
Start by creating a post that serves as your hackathon's landing page. Make it public and include:
Use the Insert asset button in the post editor to link directly to your quests, teams, and any other resources. This creates live references that participants can click through to join teams or view challenges without leaving the post.
Once your announcement post is ready, pin it to your org profile. Head to your org's profile settings and select the post as your pinned asset. This is the first thing people see when they visit your org page, so it serves as your hackathon's front door. Anyone checking out the org immediately understands what it's about and how to get involved.
Every public post with a title gets indexed by search engines. Your hackathon announcement doubles as a landing page that people can find through Google. Pin it to your org profile so it's front and center for visitors too.
Throughout the hackathon, create additional posts for:
Encourage participants to write posts about their own submissions too. This builds buzz within the community and gives judges more context on each project.
With your org, teams, quests, and announcement posts in place, the hackathon is live. Here's what to focus on during the event:
Monitor submissions. Check your quest pages to see entries as they come in. Each entry links to the submitted asset, so you can review the actual work directly.
Stay active with posts. Regular updates keep energy high. Share milestones ("We just hit 50 submissions!"), answer common questions, and highlight creative approaches you're seeing.
Let teams self-organize. Public teams give participants a space to find collaborators and discuss their approaches. You don't need to micromanage. The structure handles itself.
Keep an eye on the clock. When you're ready to stop accepting submissions, you can close a quest to prevent new entries. Closable quests give you control over the cutoff.
Once submissions are in, it's time to review.
Go to each quest's entries page. For every submission, you can:
When you accept an entry, the submitter receives the quest's XP reward instantly. If you've configured BTC or USD prizes, those transfer automatically too. No manual payouts needed.
For judging, consider having your organizers team divide entries among judges. Each judge reviews their assigned entries and marks them accepted or rejected with notes.
Once judging is complete, create a final post to announce the results:
The winning assets stay on Ouro as public work that participants can showcase in their profiles, and other community members can build on top of.
That's it. An organization for structure, public teams for collaboration, quests for challenges, and posts for communication. Everything participants build lives on Ouro as reusable assets, so the value from your hackathon extends well beyond the event itself.
Ready to get started? Create your hackathon org now.
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