Updating the README to include all the information required for judging criteria for CW21 Hackday (1 April 2021)

[LauraCarter]

From the website for CW21 : https://software.ac.uk/cw21/hack-day

Judging criteria

What follows are the criteria for how your Hack Day entry will be judged.

During the 5 minute presentation of your Hack Day work, each team must show how they address the criteria. Failure to do this might prevent a good entry from getting a good score during its assessment.

Each category will be scored from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest); weighting may be applied to the categories but the judges will decide on this during their meeting on the Hack Day.

1. Novelty, creativity, coolness and/or usefulness

• Can you clearly define the problem that is being solved and how are you trying to solve it?
• Are you doing something new, better, slick or really useful to yourself or others?
• Is your solution purely self-serving, or is it enabling in some other way. You need to provide reasons as to how your Hack Day project benefits a wider community of potential users/developers to get the best marks during assessment.
• The advice here is indicative; other justifications in this space are welcome (within the constraints of presenting).

2. Implementation and infrastructure

• Are you following research software best practice for the use of infrastructure? Is a source code repository being used? Is there documentation? Are appropriate services and infrastructure being used (e.g. cloud computing, databases)?
• If you are building on existing work, it’s essential that you are clear about what was done during the Hack Day in terms of adding features and functionality etc. (If this is not clear you will lose marks).
• Does your solution work for the stated purpose - can this be shown during the demo?
• If your team is developing a standard, are you using collaborative techniques and tools to allow contribution from the whole team?
• For paper hackathons involving presentation of data or analysis, are you using reproducible frameworks for the paper authoring?
• For other research software related hacks, is it clear you are using best practice in the construction of the work?

3. Demo and presentation

• Did the presentation and demo show how your hack has fulfilled the judging criteria?
• Did your team communicate the essence of why they did what they did and why it was important?
• If your team were demonstrating results (e.g. from an analysis), were they appropriate for the data chosen?

4. Project transparency

• Was your source code available on an open repository at presentation time? Teams may choose to work open or work closed. If you happen to decide that you want a publication from this work then you may choose to be open about your methods but not your data, for example. However, building and being able to build on each other's work during the Hack Day will be viewed favourably.
• Ideally your repository should contain a README covering configuration, make and run instructions included with the code. In addition there should be a brief description of the project and what the software/scripts do, along with a license.
• These criteria may not be directly relevant for certain categories of entry; in this case other aspects of transparency and openness will be used as decided upon by the judging panel.

5. Future potential

• Was it clear how your work could be taken forward in the future, could it modify existing work, or be part of a new paper, initiative or bid?
• Were ideas of future steps provided?
• Was it mere fun or did the idea show usefulness in the long term?

6. Team work

• Was your team led well, were they able to involve all interested team members?
• Were non-technical members directed towards meaningful contributions; e.g. documentation, testing, usability and logo design in the case of more software-related hacks?
• Did your team’s software practices support synchronised working and decrease duplication? Did your team achieve more together than would have been possible separately?
• Was your team atmosphere healthy: disagreements are fine, but were they conducted agreeably?
• Did it appear enjoyable and/or fun to be part of your team?