Competitors must register on our website before the 23rd of September. After registrations competitors will be emailed with the details of obtaining access to the relevant API’s. On the day, all participants are provided with a welcome lunch, dinner, and midnight snacks on Saturday, and breakfast and lunch on Sunday.

Workshops will also be run in various locations around Sydney to introduce competitors to the OpenSocial gadgets and SciVerse API. Everyone in invited to attend the workshop, regardless of wether they are competing. Please check here for their schedule.

To be considered for the main prizes pplications must include data from Elsevier APIs on the SciVerse platform. SciVerse is an implementation of OpenSocial and SciVerse gadgets or apps are essentially iframes or client side apps using browser scripting languages like JavaScript that access the page content as well as mashup content via APIs and the world wide web. Developers own the full IP rights to their applications. Please check out our Developer Info page for more.

There will be talks throughout the competition, by developers and industry figures, and there will be ‘chill-out’ and food areas for competitors to recharge during the competition.

Expect lots of great food, drinks and fun!

On the day schedule

Registration on the day will open at 11am with the competition starting at 2pm and finishing at 2pm on the following day. The competition will end by  latest 5pm on Sunday 25th of September. This will include a quick presentation of the apps by all teams and the award ceremony. For the full schedule click here.

Hackathon Location

For directions please check here.

Sydney Hackathon will take place in the School of Information Technologies, a state-of-the-art building on campus dedicated to research and education.

From its beginnings creating the first high speed computer in Australia in 1954, the School of I.T. was founded from the first computer science department in Australia. Today the School of I.T. conducts leading research in areas of algorithmics and applications, enterprise computing, human centred computing, IT applications in health care and it is one the leading academic and research institutions in information technology in Australia.

Judging Criteria

All eligible entries will be evaluated and ranked by a panel of qualified judges based on but not limited to the following criteria:

Originality

• How original is the idea of the Application? Is the Application using existing functionality or creating new functionality? Does the Application make use of third party tools? Does the Application use externally hosted code?

Clarity

• Among other factors, this criterion looks at: simplicity of the code; user-friendliness of design; how easy is it to navigate to Application? Is the functionality obvious and intuitive?

Value Proposition

• Does the Application add new functionality to the SciVerse platform? How substantial and complex is the functionality of the Application? Does the Application add functionality that users are expecting based on their usage of other platforms? Will the Application be useful to researchers, librarians and students? Does the Application add external data and make use of external APIs.

Quality of Software Development

• Readability of code; is the Application free of errors?; Does the Application run on different browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari); Does the code run fast or delay the rendering of the page? Can the code be easily reused by other gadgets or on other platforms?

The judges’ decisions are final and binding.

Winner Selection

On Saturday September 25, 2011, at around 4 PM Sydney time, three (3) winners will be selected based upon the judging criteria and announced during the Prizes and Awards Ceremony. For full details around the Terms and Conditions of the prizes please click here.