Frequently Asked Questions
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Carbon Hack 2024 is a global hackathon for developers who want to make a difference in the fight against climate change. It challenges participants to use the Impact Framework, a tool that allows measuring and calculating the environmental impact of software.
Carbon Hack 2024 will take place from 18th March to 8th April 2024. It is a virtual event, so you can join from anywhere in the world.
The theme of Carbon Hack 2024 is measurement. We want to see how you can use the Impact Framework to measure the carbon emissions, water consumption, or any other environmental impact of software. You can also create models, manifest files, content, or contributions to the framework itself.
For Carbon Hack we are challenging participants to build solutions that align to and extend the capability of IF.
Carbon Hack 2024 offers prizes in a selection of different categories. Read about the prizes and judging criteria.
Judges are drawn from the organizations sponsoring Carbon Hack 2024, as well as key stakeholders from the Green Software Foundation. A full list will be published when the hack begins.
Our vision is to unleash the creative potential of developers who care about the planet and want to make a difference. We believe that software can be a powerful tool for reducing carbon emissions and promoting sustainability, and we want to celebrate the innovative solutions that you will create and share with the world. By participating in the Hackathon, you are not only demonstrating your skills and passion, but also inspiring others to join the Green Software movement and make an impact for the future.
Project registration and judging submission closes at 23:59 UTC on 8 April 2024.
You must have raised your project in GitHub and submitted the forms on hack.greensoftware.foundation before that date.
You can register your project at any point before that.
Read our Participation Guide
Read our Rules and Terms & Conditions
No, you must participate and register in only one hack team each (as a participant or as the lead).
Every Hack entrants needs to register into our Hackathon via our registration form, by 23:59 UTC 8 April.
No, because all interactions are designed to be on GitHub. Use Discussions to connect with other participants, ask questions, and find team members.
If you are looking to join a project or contribute to an existing project idea submitted, we recommend commenting within an idea issue.
Impact Framework (IF) aims to make the environmental impacts of software easier to calculate and share.
IF allows you to calculate the environmental impacts, such as carbon, of your software applications without writing any code. All you have to do is write a simple manifest file and IF handles the rest.
The project is entirely open source and composability is a core design principle - we want you to be able to create your own plugins and use them in our framework, or pick from a broad universe of open source models created by others.
To work with IF, you will also need to install the Impact Engine CLI and have access to the Impact Framework repository.
The absolute simplest single model case might take 10 mins for someone with some prior exposure to the syntax. For a new user perhaps longer to get the structure and syntax sorted. We have users with >450,000 line manifest files that probably took weeks to organize.
We welcome contributions to IF whether they are part of the hackathon or not.
Please visit the Impact Framework GitHub repository and look for issues labelled "good first issue" or "help wanted".
Only Project Leads need to complete the process. We require only one submission per team.
Video submissions and content provided on the GitHub issue will be used by the judges to determine their score.
Video submissions should be uploaded to YouTube and linked from there in your submission.
You are only able to submit for one category, if your project spans multiple please chose the one where the judging criteria best demonstrate the strength of your submission.
For plugins, you should commit code to your own Github repository, and not raise pull requests against the IF core repositories. Your plugins should live entirely in a repository that you control. You can then run your plugin from IF by following the instructions here. You could also publish your plugin code as an npm package if you prefer.
To submit your code you can provide the link to the Github repository or npm package so that the judges can run your plugin in their own local copy of IF.
Contributions to the framework itself can be submitted by PR to your own forked copy of the IF repository. As long as you provide a link that allows the judges to see precisely the code you want to be judged, it is ok. Please make it very clear in any PR that it represents a hackathon submission. Note that even if we like your changes - even if you win a prize - there is no guarantee the PR will be merged in upstream.
Content contributions can also be managed in your own Github repository or other suitable platform (you can, for example, publish to your own website, substack, blog etc) and provide the link, as long as judges can freely read it without requiring any sign-up, subscriptions or payment.
You can provide links to each component repository. Please make it clear to the judges how the different components work together and provide detailed documentation
It is up to you to decide what you want to be judged as your submission for the hackathon. Please describe in your submission what is in the scope of your submission. The judges will evaluate everything you define as in scope.
The judges are unlikely to undertake a detailed technical review of your source code. They will be more likely to run your code locally to see that it functions as expected and then judge it based on the qualitative benefits it is likely to confer on the IF and the wider IF community.
We are flexible on the format, but typically we would expect markdown files in your Github repository, but we will also be happy with e.g. HackMD pages, or if you host the docs on your website that's fine too.