About Dribdat

Built around Web-friendly standards like Schema.org and Frictionless Data, Dribdat (from "driven by data") is an MIT licensed project in an open source ecosystem. It features handy bootstraps (authentication, file uploading, data import/export, etc.), useful workflows (announce an event - publish challenges - form teams - develop projects) and diverse channels (social media sharing, digital signage, summary reports).

Of course, we could also just make a simple website, but, ask yourself, how hacky would that be?

Image: The Q via The Awesomer

Purpose

It begins with a countdown, defining the start and finish of a time-boxed event:

At the heart of Dribdat is a hexagonal visualization of your teams, showing their relative progress at a glance:

Created in light of the Hacker ethic, the Zen of Dribdat is (in a nutshell):

• Commit sustainably: archive collected results in open, web-friendly data formats.
• Live and let live: share designs, dev-envs, docs accessible to your entire team.
• Co-create in safe spaces: promote safer conduct, balancing openness with privacy.
• Appreciate hexagons: 120° of symmetry imply community resilience and social good.

Dribdat sprints (see Tour de Hack for some examples) typically involve open licenses (Creative Commons, Open Data Commons, etc.), community-developed templates (School of Data Pipeline), or governance instruments (Hack Code of Conduct).

Empowering thousands of people to prototype using public data and open source code, Dribdat is the official platform of Opendata.ch - Swiss chapter of Open Knowledge, and has been used to host dozens of events in the Swiss open data, open hardware, and open source community.

Our project started from a Cookiecutter, striving in itself to be an example of a hackable project that can be adapted to other needs and causes. It can be used just as a Python-powered backend to aggregate data from Gitea, GitHub, GitLab and other repositories and fileshares in one place.

There is a Vue.js-based Backboard app (shown above) and a Node.js Chatbot available as alternatives to the default Bootstrap user interface, easily customized with a bit of CSS. You can customize the layout and presets in an admin panel, or with YAML configuration files.

All the data is aggregated with an open standard (hackathon.json), and can be exported in various formats at any time. There is more on this in the User Guide and Whitepaper.

Visit the 👁️‍🗨️ Hackfinder to find upcoming events and current research, and join our ongoing 🧬 Hack:Org:X sessions to meet other hackathon organizers.

See also our roadmap and sign up for the beta 🔜 EveryHack.day