❯ organizer
You run the clock
Create the event, publish the timeline, open registration, appoint judges, score, announce winners. One admin panel, no spreadsheets.
Everything an organizer does is pinned to a single moment: T-0, when hacking starts. This guide walks the whole clock — what to decide, when to decide it, and which screen on ClusterHack does the work so you are not holding it in your head at 3am.
// jump to any phase
ClusterHack is the operating system for a hackathon: one event page that handles sign-ups, team forming, the timeline, project submissions, judging and the public showcase. You fill in fields; participants, judges and sponsors each get the view meant for them.
Create the event, publish the timeline, open registration, appoint judges, score, announce winners. One admin panel, no spreadsheets.
Sign up, join or start a team, see what is happening next, plan on a board, and submit the project before the deadline.
An invite link, a panel of the projects, your criteria with weights. Scores add up into a leaderboard you publish when you are ready.
Start with the question a sponsor will ask you: what is this event for? Themes usually follow whoever is paying — a company's real problem, a technology someone wants adopted, a community's shared itch. Write the answer in one sentence before anything else.
Do not expect a finished product by the end. It happens, rarely. What you are buying with a weekend is a working demo and a room full of people who now know each other.
Every theme wants someone who can answer questions about it and advise teams that get stuck. Ask them, in advance, for a short reading list for beginners — it is the cheapest thing you can do for your least experienced teams.
No expert available? Then the track is harder than it looks, because the same scarcity applies to participants. Keep at least one track approachable: the room is never all seniors, and a hackathon that only rewards experts loses its next generation.
Set a registration cap and plan for roughly half of the people who register to show up. That ratio decides your venue, your catering and your budget more than anything else on this page.
The event page is the single source of truth for the weekend. If it is not on the page, it will be asked in the chat forty times. Fill in the timeline first — people decide whether to come based on when things happen, not on your poster.
Team size limits, what counts as pre-existing code, submission deadline, what a demo must include. Deciding these at T-14d is administration. Deciding them at T+40h, with a team arguing in front of you, is a dispute.
Give every criterion a name, a short description of what a high score means, a weight and a maximum. Judges score fast and consistently when the rubric is explicit, and teams can aim at something. Publish it — a hidden rubric is a lottery.
Custom registration questions are tempting. Every extra field costs you sign-ups. Ask for the t-shirt size and the dietary restriction if you are actually buying shirts and food; otherwise leave it out.
Finding sponsors is the hardest part of this list and there is no clean instruction for it. In practice it runs on who you know: the more people you ask, the likelier one says yes. Go in with a finished plan — a sponsor is buying a specific event, not an idea.
Sponsors are not only prizes. The two big line items at almost every hackathon are food and the room, followed by equipment and furniture rental. A sponsor who covers dinner has done more for the weekend than one who adds a fourth prize.
Per person, you owe:
Then the things nobody thinks about until they bite: ventilation (a full room gets stuffy fast — if the windows are the only option, schedule gaps to air it out), toilets, the nearest 24-hour food, the nearest place to sleep, and whether the microphone reaches the back row over the noise of a working room.
Pick the room where demos happen and check that everyone fits, that the screen does not glare, that every seat can see it, that the presentation machine exists and works, and that someone is on it — a clicker or an assistant. A final round that starts twenty minutes late ends an hour late.
Running through the night? Settle it with the landlord and with security in advance, in person. Talk to the head of security about the details yourself. Then tell participants the rules for being in the building at night.
Open the chat you will run the event in — Telegram, Slack, whatever your crowd already uses. Remind people three days out and one day out. Those two messages are worth more than a month of posters.
Walk your own checklist once more: badges printed, participant list exported, the registration desk staffed, the wi-fi password written somewhere large, prizes physically present. Then check what happens if you are wrong — who do people call, and is that person's number on the event page?
Leave instructions for latecomers. People travel from other cities and hit traffic; a participant who arrives to a locked door and no contact is a participant you lose.
Keep the desk staffed and keep it open. Someone should be there an hour to ninety minutes before the start and should not wander off afterwards. Online check-in removes most of this problem: people know how to get in, tell you their team has started, and find where to collect a badge without an assistant standing there.
Say what matters: who the administrators are, who the experts are, where to smoke, where the toilets are, where to eat nearby, and what happens next. Unless you owe a sponsor a slot, do not make anyone attend. Hackers resent having their hours spent for them, and you will get the attention back later if you spend it carefully now.
Give teams that need people one minute each: who they are, how many, what they are building, who they are looking for. That is the single highest-value ten minutes of the whole opening — and it is the part the platform does better than a microphone, because it keeps working after the speech ends.
Do not start the clock until people are seated, sorted into teams and ready to work. A start time that is technically on schedule but finds half the room still queuing is not on schedule.
Walk up to every team. Not a broadcast — an actual visit. Pay the most attention to the newcomers: help them narrow a topic, hand them to an expert, point them at a resource. A first-time hacker who leaves with something working comes back next year. One who leaves stuck does not.
If you have a spare pair of hands, put them on a camera. Photos and video during the night are the only marketing asset a hackathon produces for free. Post them under one hashtag afterwards.
At night, do not sit guard. You arranged this with the landlord and security at T-7d for exactly this reason. Sleep — the hard hours are on the other side of the clock.
The hackathon ends the way it should: every team presents. Hold the time limit — firmly and identically for everyone. Say who is next, and make sure that team knows and is ready at the side of the stage. If they are not, skip to the one after and come back.
Give judges the rubric and ask them to write as they go: a score per criterion and a note per team. Detailed notes during the demos are the reason deliberation takes twenty minutes instead of two hours — and they are the feedback teams actually want to take home.
Set an explicit cap on deliberation. An hour is generous. A room that has been awake for two days will not wait politely past it.
Publish the winners. Send the certificates. Post the photos. Thank everyone in the chat, by name where you can.
Do not delete the chat. Weeks later someone will see a project from your event and want to reach the team; someone else will be hiring; two people who met at table nine will start something. That afterlife is most of what a hackathon is actually worth, and it costs you nothing to leave the door open.
Clean the room. You want it next year.
If you only remember one thing about the platform: everything hangs off an event, and everything else is a view of it for a particular person.
Dates, timeline, rules, tracks, sponsors, speakers, FAQ, registration questions. The page everything else reads from.
/event_create/ → everyoneWhat is running and what is coming. Where a participant finds you, and where you look before choosing your own dates.
/events/ → participantStart a team or join one, declare the roles you still need, list who is looking. Solves the worst ten minutes of any hackathon.
/teams/ → participantA kanban board per team, so a weekend of work has a shape and nobody builds the same thing twice.
/kanban/ → everyoneTitle, description, repo, demo, video, screenshots. Submitted before the deadline, then public forever with its own page.
/showcase/ → judgeWeighted criteria, one panel per judge, comments back to teams, and a leaderboard that adds the public vote to the expert score.
criteria → panel → leaderboard → participantA page per person: what they shipped, where, with whom. The reason to fill in your profile at sign-up.
/hackers/ → sponsorA profile for the organizations behind an event — and a way for sponsors to find hackathons worth backing.
/companys/ → organizerRun the whole event from Claude, Cursor or your own scripts. Same permissions you have in the browser, over one OAuth login.
/mcp-features →None of these are rules from a committee. They are the mistakes that make hackers quietly decide not to come to your next one.
People differ wildly in how they handle it, and the failure mode is a room that stops producing. Whatever you were buying with it, buy it with food instead.
Hackers guard their hours; taking them by decree is the fastest way to lose goodwill. Stream the talks, put them at a sane time, and let a confident schedule earn the audience.
Someone coding through your lecture is not being rude. Some people focus that way, some already know the material and are waiting for the one part they don't. Let the room be itself.
This is not a summer camp. Teams came to out-build the other teams inside a fixed number of hours, and every organized game is hours taken from that. Team forming is the only mixing they asked for.
Fill in the fields, follow the prompts, and let the page answer the questions so you can be in the room instead of on the phone.