HackMIT 2019 - Know Before You Go
The collegiate hackathon season has arrived! This weekend, the DocuSign API team will be returning as a Gold sponsor to HackMIT. Last year, after traveling to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for PennApps at the University of Pennsylvania, sunny San Diego, California for SDHacks at UCSD, and Boston, Massachusetts for HackMIT, we were especially excited by the projects from the MIT hacker community at.
From 8 a.m. Saturday until 10 a.m. Sunday, a team of DocuSign engineers will introduce the DocuSign APIs and support participants as they hack their way to success. HackMIT, the entirely student-organized hackathon established in 2013, is one of the largest and most popular ongoing hackathons in the country, attracting more than 1,000 collegiate engineers from all over the globe.
HackMIT 2018 Recap
Last year, our winning team was “Sign-Off”, led by Nandit Mehra, Harsh Patel, Regina Lyons, and Robin Lin. The team reasoned that most people dislike reading long documents, and therefore skim to complete required tasks quickly. This often results in miscommunication and a lack of true understanding.
Sign-off is a web application that aims to ease the process of business contract signing by reducing human error. This tool presents the user with summarized document text by using the fundamentals of natural language processing (NLP), while ensuring that all key points in the contract are presented to the user. The summarized text is passed through DocuSign’s eSignature API to the recipient, along with the link to the contract to be signed. The sender is notified when the recipient signs the document through the web app.
For a full spotlight of last year’s winning team, check out this Developer Spotlight blog post.
This Year’s Challenges and Prizes
The challenges this year are pretty straightforward: present the best use of either the DocuSign eSignature API or Click API. Our intent behind these open-ended challenges is to enable hackers to be as creative as possible with their projects.
For each of the two challenges, we will award prizes to our first and second place winners. For the team in second place, we will award $500 cash. For the first place prize, we'll award:
- $1,000 cash
- A feature on the DocuSign Developer Center
- A feature on DocuSign API social media outlets and blog
Judging Criteria
Judging transparency is incredibly important to the team! We look forward to evaluating novel creations with the DocuSign Agreement Cloud APIs. Here are things to keep in mind:
- Technical Difficulty: Is the project technically challenging? Does the project include some advanced DocuSign features or integrate with multiple APIs? This is the most important factor for judging a winning project.
- Originality: Is the project more than just another generic social/mobile/local app? Does it do something entirely novel, or at least take a fresh approach to an old problem?
- Polish: Is the project usable in its current state? Is the user experience smooth? Does everything appear to work? Is it well designed?
- Usefulness: Is the project practical? Is it something people would actually use? Does it fulfill a real-world need?
If you’re attending HackMIT 2019, come collect some swag and challenge instructions at our sponsor table. For everyone else, Be sure to find us at future events and check out our many other developer resources:
