Announcing the Directus AI Hackathon

We're excited to announce our very first Directus Hackathon - this time with the theme of AI. Directus provides an extensive toolkit to work with data and is perfect for huge enterprise and hobby projects alike. We’re challenging you to bring your creativity and technical skills to the table for the chance to win cash prizes and swag.

Key Information

• Start: August 3 2023 at 00:00 UTC.
• End: August 31 2023 at 23:59 UTC.
• One challenge: Build a project that utilizes AI and Directus.
• Two prizes: $1000 USD and a $250 USD charity donation from our list of charities. One decided by the Directus Core Team, one by community voting.

The Theme

We want to see how you would combine Directus and AI features by creating new Directus extensions.

You may choose to build a new Insights Panel for our dashboards, a custom Flows Operation for our automations feature, a cool Editor Interface to support content creation or review, or any of the other extensions types.

We’re pretty open to seeing what you build, so we’ve left the scope quite wide for this one.

Submitting Your Project

To submit your project, you must:

• Add your extension code to a public repository on GitHub.
• Use our README template and replace anything in curly brackets with your submission's value.
• Add the directus and directus-ai-hackathon tags to your GitHub repository.
• Fill in this form to provide your email address so we can get in touch with results.

We encourage all projects to include a LICENSE file in your repository with the Apache License 2.0, the GNU General Public License v3.0, or the MIT License.

The submission period ends on August 31 2023 at 23:59 UTC. You must complete all of the steps above by this time to be eligible. If you work with others, only one person must complete the steps.

Judging

On September 1 2023, we will curate all valid submissions into a blog post on the Directus Developer Blog with links to the last commit before the submission deadline (further commits will not be assessed).

When judging projects, we will look at the following criteria with no specific weighting:

1. Creative: Is the idea original and innovative?
2. Technical: How effectively do you integrate AI? Is the project well-executed? Does it run?
3. Relevance: Do you solve a real problem faced by people?
4. Presentation: Have you taken time to add polish to your project?

Judging will take place from September 1 2023 until September 10 at 23:59 UTC.

Community Vote

One of our prizes is decided by the community. From the valid submissions posted on our blog, the repository with the most GitHub Stars before the end of the judging period will win this category. No stars given or removed after the end of the judging period will be accepted.

The Prizes

Both the Directus Core Team and Community Vote prizes are the same:

• $1000 USD awarded to the project submitter.
• $250 USD donation to a charity of the winner’s choice from the following list:
  • codebar - a charity that facilitates the growth of a diverse tech community by running free regular programming workshops for minority groups in tech.
  • VetsInTech - who support transitioning military, veterans and spouses of either with reintegration services, and by connecting them to the national technology ecosystem.
  • Out In Tech - the world’s largest non-profit community of LGBTQ+ tech leaders.
  • Carbon180 works toward developing equitable, science-based policies that will scale carbon removal.
  • Cool Earth works with rainforest communities, tackles the root causes of deforestation, and protects vital carbon sinks.

Winners will be announced at a live Discord event on September 11 2023, and winners contacted over email on the same day.

Get Started

You can get started using a hosted Directus Cloud project or by running your own locally, using Docker, in just a few minutes

You can find educational resources here on the Directus Developer Blog, in our docs guides, and on our YouTube channel.

At any point during the hacking period, feel free to drop by our Discord server and ask for help in the #help-general channel, or ask questions about the hackathon in the #hackathon channel. We also have weekly Office Hours events on Thursdays which we’ll dedicate to the hackathon throughout August.

Additional Notes

• Multiple submissions are allowed, and will be judged separately.
• You own your projects - our incentive is to see the cool things people build.
• We don’t handle prize-splitting, so if you’re working with others and win, we’ll send the prize to the Team Lead and they’ll be responsible for distributing it.
• You can find the Terms & Conditions for this contest here.

Let’s Go!

This is the first time we’re running our own hackathon, and we’re always open to adapting the format for future editions. Please do provide feedback and what does and doesn’t work for you.

We are so excited to see your projects and the cool ideas you come up with!