OSDHack is an annual hackathon, organized by the Open Source Developers Community of JIIT Noida, Sector-62. Previously organized at the intra-college level, this year we decided to scale it up and host a nation-wide open hackathon. We saw registrations of 450+ participants and a whopping total of 100+ teams, which turned out to be way more than we had expected!

Everything, right from planning till execution was handled by the students of the community and it wasn’t a piece of cake. It’s been an exceptionally challenging journey, which the team navigated through with each other’s help. Despite being a tiring and draining experience, it gave us learnings that were valuable, and made us realize how big of a task it is to organize a large scale event.

The planning for OSDHack'22 started back in December 2021, a few weeks prior to our end semester exams in college. Our college had allocated some funds to us for the hackathon so we decided a rough roadmap to follow and got working right after the exams ended.

We were slightly clueless initially since none of us had ever organized an event of this scale before, so we didn’t know how we should proceed, and what all had to be done.

We needed to make the website and have it up and running by the deadlines we had set for ourselves, plan the entire course of the event and other mini-events, we also had to get in touch with sponsors (extended thanks to FOSS United and all other sponsors for their generous support), contact potential guest speakers for our speaker sessions and talk to Devfolio to host our hackathon.

Finally, after countless all-nighters, staying up till late on Discord with the team and getting work done, we were finally ready for our hackathon to go live.

We had four taxing and fun days during our hackathon period, talking to the participants, organizing the guest speaker sessions (on our YouTube channel here), conducting the daily quizzes, and conducting the evaluations. The four days kept us so busy that they just flew by.

Being a F/OSS community, we had a criteria that all projects needed to be Open-Sourced, and to promote OSS, had a special Open-Source track for projects that fill a gap in an existing Open-Source ecosystem. This track wouldn’t have been possible without the support of FOSS United! After two rounds of evaluations by our own team, the top 10 teams presented their demos to the guest judges, and the final winners were decided after some hot debates. We announced the final winners at 12 A.M. on the day the hackathon ended and they were as follows -

1st Prize - Samarth Aims to provide employment opportunities for people with different types of disabilities
devfolio.co/submissions/samarth-0458

2nd Prize - Kaboom A platform for people who wish to pursue comic/digital art creation as a career and earn money
devfolio.co/submissions/kaboom-ad0d

3rd Prize - MerchXMusic Gamify buying celebrity merch and provide a marketplace for artists to sell their unique NFTs
devfolio.co/submissions/merchxmusic-5a2c

Open-Source Track Winner - fossclub Reward platform for FOSS contributors to incentivize open source contributions
devfolio.co/submissions/fossclub-c919

JIIT Only-Team Track Prize - Goggs New-gen ID cards to solve issues faced by traditional ID card system
devfolio.co/submissions/goggs-6f07

JIIT Girls-Only Team Track Prize - FURIESRescue Website that focuses on the well being of animals and spreading awareness among the society
devfolio.co/submissions/furiesrescue-4c2f

This article was originally posted on FOSS United Forum here