The Hack-o-matic is a simple webapp that facilitates remote and on-site hackathons. It handles team registration, quadratic voting, and presenting the outcome of the vote. It needs an external system such as OAuth2 Proxy for user management and authentication.
A hackathon has the following phases:
- Registration — Any user can start a team. Teams have a name and short description. Users can also join teams that others have created.
- Presentation — At this point teams can no longer be changed. In this phase teams can present what they built.
- Evaluation — Any user (also those not in a team) can cast their vote. Users cannot vote for teams that they are a member of. The voting system is quadratic voting. Although it is not the simplest system, it worked out well at Chorus One.
- Revelation — The admin can see the outcome of the vote, but it is still hidden from regular users. The teams are sorted with the winner at the bottom of the page. This enables the admin to present their screen and simply scroll down to reveal the winners. All of the votes are public.
- Celebration — At this point every user can view the outcome of the vote, and teams are sorted by descending points, with the winner at the top of the page.
The Hack-o-matic is written in Rust and builds with Cargo:
cargo build --release
target/release/hackomatic hackomatic.toml
The binary starts a webserver that listens on the configured
port. This webserver is expected to be protected by a reverse-proxy that sets
the X-Email header. The reverse proxy should handle authentication and
authorization. This is a convenient way to ensure that all people in your
organization can join and vote without having to create an account anywhere.
One possible setup is to use Nginx and OAuth2 Proxy. To make OAuth2
Proxy pass the user’s email address, enable the --set-xauthrequest option.
The documentation contains an example for how to configure Nginx to
set the X-Email header when using auth_request.
The Hack-o-matic stores all data in a SQLite database. To start a new hackathon,
simply change the database file in the configuration. To back up a database, one
convenient way is to use VACUUM INTO:
$ sqlite3 hackomatic.sqlite3
sqlite> VACUUM INTO 'hackomatic-backup.sqlite3';
There is a single toml configuration file. See hackomatic.toml for an example.
See src/config.rs for documentation of the fields.
For local testing where no reverse proxy to set the X-Email header is
available, you can set debug.unsafe_default_email to an email address that
will be used when no X-Email header is present. This feature is of course
unsafe to use in production.
The Hack-o-matic is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. A copy of the license is included in the root of the repository.