Hackontest aims to enhance software

Hackontest is a 24 hour programming competition between teams of three open source software projects. The event will take place at OpenExpo on September 24/25, 2008 in Zurich, Switzerland.

The idea of the Hackontest event is three-fold:

• Hackers (smart programmers) of open source projects meet physically during 24h and enhance their software with a certain feature. Thus their Free Software project gets improved in terms of code and the developers have a fun time meeting in one place and competing for some nice prizes.
• Users of open source software get the opportunity to file features they’ve missed in their favorite applications and operating systems. Therefore, during the selection process everyone who registers may file feature requests and others may vote and comment on them.
• Visitors of the Hackontest event get the chance to see the commitment and team work with which open source software is created. Like this, the public becomes more aware of the creative processes and the power of collaborative effort by international open source communities.

Hackontest is a project of informatica08, organized by the Swiss Open Systems User Groupd /ch/open and sponsored by Google. The competition is invented and coordinated by Matthias Stuermer and supported by Leslie Hawthorn, Hannes Gassert, Emanuel Indermuehle and Stefan Sicher.