A Practical Guide for Organizers
Your hackathon went very well. Submissions are in. Now comes the part where many hackathons stumble.
Judging looks straightforward on paper: review projects, pick winners. But in practice, it’s where unclear expectations, mismatched reviewers, and missed deadlines pile up. The good news: most judging problems are preventable with upfront planning.
Here’s what that looks like based on thousands of hackathons supported by DoraHacks.
Define What You’re Actually Evaluating
Scoring submissions across a few metrics is standard practice. But don’t exhaust your judges. Stick to three or four criteria that cover genuinely different angles like code quality, creativity, alignment with the rules, presentation, etc..
Meanwhile, be specific about what those criteria mean. “We’ll judge on innovation, execution, and impact” sounds reasonable until three judges interpret those words three different ways.
Get concrete. If you’re running a hackathon for a DeFi protocol, your criteria might include whether the project uses your smart contracts correctly, and whether the team shipped something functional versus a slide deck. If you’re running a vibe coding hackathon, maybe speed of development and creative use of AI tools matter more than polished code architecture.
Explain the criteria as questions judges can answer: “Innovation: Does this project demonstrate an innovative integration with our API?” is evaluable. “Is this project exciting?” only invites debate.
Assign weights if priorities differ. A hackathon focused on getting developers to try a new SDK might weight “correct implementation” at 40% and “good presentation” at 10%. Make those weights visible to judges and participants alike.
Match Judges to What They Know
Not every judge needs to review every submission. Think about what each track or prize category actually requires. A track for developer tooling probably needs judges who’ve built or used similar tools. A track for consumer apps benefits from someone who thinks about user experience. If you’re giving out a “Best Use of [Specific Technology]” prize, at least one judge should know that technology deeply.
On DoraHacks, you can assign judges to specific tracks rather than making everyone review everything (although you CAN still do that if necessary). A judge with smart contract expertise reviews the DeFi track. A designer reviews the UI/UX prize submissions. This produces better evaluations and respects judges’ time because nobody wants to score projects outside their wheelhouse.
Set a Clear Schedule
Judges agreed to help, but your hackathon is probably item number twelve on their to-do list.
Give them a specific window. “Judging opens Monday at 9am, scores due by Thursday at 6pm” is enforceable. “Please review when you get a chance” is not. Build your timeline backward from when you want to announce winners, and add a buffer for stragglers. Send reminders at the start, midpoint, and 24 hours before the deadline.
Remember: hackers are waiting. They spent a weekend, or even a month building under pressure, and now they’re refreshing the page wondering if they made the shortlist. Delayed announcements don’t just look unprofessional. They frustrate the exact people you’re trying to impress.
Set internal deadlines tighter than public ones. Follow up with slow judges. If something slips, communicate proactively. A quick “results coming Wednesday” update buys goodwill that silence destroys.
Make Judging Effortless
Judges volunteered their expertise, not their patience.
The evaluation process should be as simple as possible. Choose a platform that’s intuitive to navigate. Provide clear instructions: how to access submissions, where to enter scores, what each criterion means. If judges have to email you asking how the system works, something’s wrong.
Before judging opens, do a walkthrough yourself. Can judges find their assigned submissions easily? Are the criteria descriptions clear without additional explanation? If projects include demo videos or GitHub repos, are they linked directly?
DoraHacks’ judging platform is built for this: smooth enough that judges can start evaluating immediately, flexible enough to handle different scoring systems and track structures.
Small things matter. Every bit of friction you remove is attention judges can redirect to the projects themselves.
Use AI to Handle Volume, Or Just Get a Second Opinion
No matter if it’s a small or huge submission pool, AI evaluation adds value.
DoraHacks’ AI judging system reviews every submission against your defined requirements (maybe “must include working demo” and “must use our authentication API”) and produces a ranked list with scores and reasoning for each. At the same time, scores by human judges are displayed with AI scores side by side, making organizers able to pick winners with a fuller picture.
The benefit isn’t just speed. AI offers a perspective human judges can’t easily replicate. It applies criteria consistently without fatigue, sees every submission with equal attention, and catches patterns across the full pool. Human judges bring expertise and intuition; AI brings consistency and completeness. Used together, they surface insights either might miss alone.
The reasoning is transparent. You can see why the AI scored a project highly (“demonstrates complete integration with required features, includes video walkthrough”) or flagged concerns (“submission lacks working demo, documentation incomplete”). Organizers review the shortlist, verify the logic holds up, and make final picks from there.
About DoraHacks
DoraHacks is the leading global hackathon community and open source developer incentive platform. DoraHacks provides toolkits for anyone to organize hackathons and fund early-stage ecosystem startups.
DoraHacks creates a global hacker movement in Web3, AI, Quantum Computing and Space Tech. So far, more than 30,000 startup teams from the DoraHacks community have received over $92M in funding, and a large number of open source communities, companies and tech ecosystems are actively using DoraHacks together with its BUIDL AI capabilities for organizing hackathons and funding open source initiatives.
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