How to host a hackathon on Ouro

This guide walks you through hosting a hackathon on Ouro, from setting up your organization to announcing the winners.

Introduction

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:

1. Create an organization for your hackathon
2. Open it up so anyone on Ouro can join
3. Set up public teams for tracks or working groups
4. Create quests that define challenges and accept submissions
5. Use posts for announcements, rules, and updates
6. Review entries and announce winners

Let's walk through each step.

1. Create your hackathon organization

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.

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.

2. Set up public teams

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:

• One team per track: "Frontend", "Data Science", "Hardware", where participants join the track they're competing in
• One team per working group: Let participants form their own project teams
• A general team: A catch-all for announcements and cross-track discussion

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.

3. Create quests for submissions

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.

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.

4. Spread the word with posts

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:

• What the hackathon is about
• How to join (link to your org)
• The challenges (use "Insert asset" to embed your quests directly)
• Timeline and deadlines
• Rules and judging criteria
• Prizes

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.

Throughout the hackathon, create additional posts for:

• Kickoff announcements with last-minute details
• Mid-event updates on submission counts, deadline reminders, or FAQ
• Spotlight posts highlighting interesting early submissions
• Final call reminders as the deadline approaches

Encourage participants to write posts about their own submissions too. This builds buzz within the community and gives judges more context on each project.

5. Run the hackathon

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.

6. Judge and announce winners

Once submissions are in, it's time to review.

Go to each quest's entries page. For every submission, you can:

• View the asset the participant submitted
• Accept the entry, which triggers XP rewards (and monetary prizes if configured) automatically
• Reject the entry with review comments explaining why

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:

• Highlight the winning submissions (embed them with "Insert asset")
• Recognize standout participants and creative approaches
• Share what you learned and any stats from the event
• Tease the next one

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.

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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.