I Built VERDICT: A Hackathon Portal That Shows Its Work

The VERDICT hackathon portal was designed to not only showcase projects but also to make the judging process transparent and verifiable. Organizer and participant expectations are met through standard features like creating events, defining tracks, setting prizes, and allowing participants to form teams and submit projects.

The key differentiator is that VERDICT ensures the judging workflow is inspectable and protected. Organizers can invite judges, assign projects, consider judge workload, scope, conflicts of interest, and use rubrics with weighted criteria. Importantly, judges cannot see each other's reviews or access projects outside their assigned tracks. These backend restrictions prevent circumvention through URLs or API calls.

The scoring system accounts for individual judge tendencies and variation by modeling scores as a combination of project quality, judge offset, and noise. This prevents scores from being treated as directly comparable and makes final rankings more dependent on project quality than on judges' personal scoring styles.

To make the leaderboard trustworthy, VERDICT provides detailed explanations of how each result was determined, including which judges participated, which rubric criteria were used, how scores were combined, how judge calibration affected the outcome, and whether the underlying review data was altered after judging. This transparency transforms the hackathon portal from a simple CRUD application into an auditable system where results can be verified and traced back to the reviews that generated them.