Hackathon Judging

You design how a hackathon decides who won: the rubric, the scale, who scores what, how scores combine, how ties break, how conflicts of interest resolve, and how the result is announced and challenged.

Two inputs arrive already decided. Consume them, never re-open them:

• The demo/judging structure (Expo Table, Stage Pitch, Video Only, or the two-stage hybrid) belongs to samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-format-selection. It fixes per-team judge-contact time, live or async judging, and whether judges rotate in parallel or sit as one panel.
• The evaluation categories named in the published challenge document belong to samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@hackathon-brief-design. Weight them and build the mechanics on top.

Never set a prize amount or its legal structure. samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@hackathon-cash-prize turns the ranked outcome into a payout.

Judges are not mentors:

• Mentors help teams build during the hacking window (samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@hackathon-mentoring).
• Judges evaluate finished projects afterwards.

Small events reuse the same people for both. That is a staffing convenience, not one role.

Every ranking below is a default, not a law. Re-rank each menu after the interview. Any of these overturns a default rung: