Open Collective
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2022 #2
Published on September 20, 2022 by loleg

Summer hackathon platform improvements


We had an intense post-summer season of hackathons, both fully public and student-run events running on dribdat. Here are some of the latest changes that have been incorporated into our application. But first, check out our new and more accessible documentation website powered by the open source Livemark tool:

docs.dribdat.cc


What's new in dribdat?

One of the most important things is to acknowledge your participant's valuable time and contributions. We made the Certificate buttons easier to find, adding them to the project menu and in the user's profile. You can also more clearly see what roles you still need in your project team:

Progress tips at the top of your project screen are now more relevant, based on your stage. We have also been making more use of the recommendation engine, where projects get some content based on how far along they are. Resources at the challenge level can be even used as Templates to bootstrap the content of new projects:

We have finally added social sharing links, powered by Sharingbuttons.io, to the bottom of project pages and posts. If you write something to your project log, you can forward it to social media in just a click. If there are other networks we should support, make a GitHub issue with the suggestion. This might be made configurable in the future.

In a similar vein, Events can be now be configured with hashtags, used for the social sharing widget and feeds. The same for Project hashtags - they can also be configured now in the Details menu, and are shown near the title and in the admin project list if used. For on-location events, you might find it handy to put the project #number as the hashtag.

We have made it possible to see the full title of projects in the hexa-grid, by shrinking the font size. The screen above is from the Energy Data Hackdays 2022. When you mouse over the hexagon zooms in for a better view. The number representing the "follower" count shown next to every project in Challenge stage (shown above in the Optimizing PV challenge), to help you with team-building both on and off-line.


As an open source software project, we continue to make it easier to deploy and use and dribdat. We have recently moved our sandbox server - meta.dribdat.cc to the green-energy and IPv6-friendly provider Ungleich.ch based in Glarus, Switzerland. Thanks to the team for their excellent support, and check out #Hack4Glarus.

Visit our Releases page for more details, and have a great season of hackathons!