The Deadline Approaches

Colony
Colony
Published in
4 min readJun 21, 2018

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June 24th, 2018 at 23:59:59 UTC

Whether you’ve been steadily building since day 0, or have jumped in at the last minute and decided to furiously sprint from now until the end, it’s time to ship it!

Ship it good.

SHIP IT

You’re probably on top of the hackathon rules and submission process, but just in case, here’s the TL;DR for submitting:

When you feel ready to submit, create a new fork of the colonyHackathon repo, and add your project as a markdown file inside colonyHackathon/submissions/.

You can use submissions/exampleProject.md as a template if you like.

Be sure that your project’s description links to the repo you’ve been working in, and contains any other supporting materials that you want evaluated by judges (such as links to a pitch deck or demo video).

Once ready, submit via a new pull request to the joinColony/colonyHackathon/ master branch.

Submission Checklist for your project.md file and PR

  • Project Name (What do we call you if you win?)
  • All contributing team members listed with contact information
  • Link to your project’s repository
  • Links to all additional materials you want considered as part of your submission

Submission Checklist for your project’s repository

  • README.md with complete instructions for running your project in a local environment (if applicable)
  • Copies of additional materials, if you have them
  • Open-source License of some kind

If you’ve got any questions about the above, you can ask them in the Gitter channel and we’ll answer a.s.a.p.

Considerations for Evaluation

You’ve seen the judges lineup, right? Yeah. There are some smart cookies who are going to be looking over what you submit. Don’t be stressed out, though! They’re all a good group, and they realize you’ve managed to throw this all together in less time than it takes to brew a beer 🍺.

Still, though, there are a few things you can do to help them out, and to present your project to a judge in the best light possible:

  • Document everything. If your project has a live demo, include instructions and prerequisites for setting it up on a local environment. If there are parts that you know you’re going to come back and re-factor after the deadline, but for the moment a temporary workaround suffices, make note in the comments!
  • Write out a vision and a user story. In your project description file, start out by presenting a ‘big picture’ and then work down to how your project fits, and how it should work for an end-user. You want your audience to see both the forest and the trees.
  • Extra background is totally allowed. Every project out there has an origin story, and even if it’s not entirely necessary to understand what’s been built, knowing a bit more about the builders themselves can give judges broader context and a personal touch that might otherwise be hidden between the lines of code. Don’t worry, they’ll still only be evaluating the project on its own merits ;)

Need an extra push? We can help!

It can be challenging to get everything lined up for a deadline, and we’re here to help. There have been *lots* of great questions posted so far in Gitter, and some of them have actually helped us squash some bugs or add improvements to colonyJS!

For those of you that might want a little more quality time for support, we’re offering live Office Hours by appointment. That means you can request for some individual, real-time support from a colony dev to sort out anything you might be having trouble with in your project.

Post in the OfficeHours channel when you’d like to schedule a one-on-one support session, and we’ll try to arrange requests as they come. Unfortunately, we can only guarantee scheduling during reasonable hours in GMT +2:00 (because that’s where Chris and James are). If you’re outside of this timezone and don’t think you’ll be able to make a live session work, let us know and we’ll do our best to make sure we address your questions asynchronously.

Colony is a platform for open organisations.

Follow us on Twitter, sign up for (occasional) email updates, or if you’re feeling old skool, drop us an email.

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