Emmanuel Nnorom Undergraduate Dissertation 2016/17

Virtual Hackathon System

Supervised by R.Taylor

Abstract

Hackathons are events, whereby teams consisting of software developers, graphical designers and business developers amongst other professions collaborate within a limited time frame to build working software prototypes. These events are increasingly being used to drive innovation rather than the traditional large structured project process [1].

Traditionally, hackathon events are conducted at a particular venue. Unfortunately, this location- centric model raises a few issues in terms of accessibility, as participants who are unable to meet the travel requirements are unable to attend these events.

This student-proposed project aims to develop a cloud-based virtual hackathon system which can be used as a solution to the location-centric issue highlighted above. This is done in an effort to accept or reject the author’s hypothesis that without the constraints of location, the number of yearly participation per individuals at hackathons can be doubled. This project also aims to produce a system which closely simulates and preserves all other critical experiences gained in a face-to-face hackathon event such as networking. Currently, from the author’s research, such an end-to-end system for hackathon collaboration is not known to exist in the world.