I Built VERDICT: A Hackathon Portal That Shows Its Work

Description and use

VERDICT is a hackathon platform that makes the judging process fully transparent by enforcing backend rules, calibrating judge scores, and providing audit trails for verifiable results.

Problem

Hackathon portals often publish results without transparency, making it hard for participants to understand how scores were derived or verify that data hasn’t changed after judging.

Outcome

VERDICT demonstrates that a hackathon judging system can be designed to be auditable, with backend‑enforced rules, judge score calibration, and transparent result generation, enabling participants to understand and verify outcomes.

Workflow

• Create event with dates, tracks, prizes, and custom questions
• Participants form teams via invite links and submit projects before deadline
• Organizers invite judges, assign projects considering workload, track scope, conflicts of interest, and optional anchor projects
• Judges review assigned projects using weighted rubrics
• System records reviews, applies judge offset calibration to adjust for scoring style, and calculates final scores
• Results are published with a leaderboard that includes audit information
• Stakeholders can verify results by inspecting the audit trail and confirming no post‑judging data changes

Evidence

We wanted to build a portal where the entire judging process is inspectable.

Source

The system keeps the relevant judging information available as part of the result-generation pipeline, so the published outcome can be traced back to the reviews that produced it.

Source

Submission deadlines, judge visibility, track boundaries, and permissions all need server‑side enforcement because those are business rules, not presentation rules.

Source