Hackavote!

(TL;DR) We're hackers, just like you, and together:

- let's build a Community Prize that is judged by the community, not the judges. This way, hackers can get more extensive feedback from the community.

- Hackers list their projects and vote on the projects of others, creating a curated list. Each project can then feature its wallet address on the platform to garner support and donations from the community.

- Don't worry about spending a fortune while voting; it's either free or incurs a minimal cost. So, there is no fear of losing your money. :)

- Your time and vote are so valuable, which is why we reward you for finding and ranking projects. Once the voting concludes, I pledge to gift 100 USDC as Curator Reward to the top 3 people who were most influential on the ranking, which means they voted earlier and more on the projects that ended up ranking higher in the system as the Curator Reward. (exact formula is yet to be determined)

- If I win any official awards offered by the hackathon, I pledge to donate 25% of it to some projects listed on Hackavote.

So...

If that's enough to encourage your participation as a Hackavoter, Join this Telegram Group. Don't worry about being spammed, hackers are busy building :)

But if you're still undecided, let's dive a little deeper

Before I start, If you have any feedback or suggestion for Hackavote feel free to message me on Telegram, and I really appreciate it :)

Why Hackavote?

Currently, projects are only judged by the official judges and the hackathon partners, with feedback limited to "yes" or "no." No systematic way allows hackers to get comprehensive feedback from the community or other hackers. That's why we aim to create a ranked list of projects,

Also, there is low incentive for the hackathon members and the community to check the projects and get familiar with them. That's why we defined a Curator Reward for the top curators (as defined above) of the list to incentivise them to learn more about the projects.

Once the official hackathon concludes, the progress of the hackers is no longer tracked; worsened by a lack of incentive to continue, they fail to reach a stage whereby they could apply for grants and VC funding. We can maintain this community voting in cycles (e.g., every month for 6 months) after the hackathon to help the projects progress and possibly earn more prizes.

How is the judgement concluded?

We know that no one can judge a project except the market and the real users that want to use that product. So We recognize that only the market and the genuine users of a product can judge it effectively. There's no flawless judgment for a hackathon; we're only providing a solution that's better, fair, and more entertaining than the existing approach. Considering this assumption, we're relying on the majority of the votes of the hackathon participants to rank the hackathon projects.

Some parts of this project ,as an MVP, are centralized and rely on trusting me personally, but the overall process is transparent and auditable, and also there are no incentives for me to cheat on these parts :)

Why only hackathon participants can vote?

It is a good starter community, since we have access to each other in-person during the hackathon and can chat about Hackavote and their hackathon's projects efficiently. Also I can uniquely verify them one-by-one personally and limit people to not vote on their project or set any other limitations if necessary for preventing the system from being manipulated. The hackathon's POAP might also be helpful for verifing people.

Timeline (this could change)

At present, I'm onboarding people and gathering an audience. If you're interested in the platform, you can also help me by bringing in more Hackavoters :)
I'm getting data from the projects, but the project submission in the voting platform will be live Saturday night. (Hackavote is also a hackathon project which I should build during the hackathon :D)
We're making every effort to make submitting a project in Hackavote as easy as possible, perhaps by reading the data from your official hackathon's submission.
The submission deadline in Hackavote is Sunday 10:00 am (1 hour after the official hackathon's submission deadline)
The voting process starts Sunday 12:00 pm (1 hour after the presentation to the judges) and probably will end on midnight.