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Hélder Vasconcelos for TAIKAI

Posted on • Originally published at taikai.network

Connect your Hackathon to your Favorite Apps

TAIKAI is able to integrate with your favorite apps to automate workflows and build engaging experiences that will leverage your hackathon to a different level.

As a digital platform where our main goal is to foster innovation and as a customer-centric company, we are always trying to find novel ways to make our hackathon platform a global standard on the SaaS ecosystem.

In order to achieve that remarkable goal, it is essential for our platform to interact with other traditional applications that our customers are using on a daily basis to increase their productivity.

Apart from productivity gains, the integration with other applications allows us to extend our functionalities by allowing the hackathon organizers to create data automation and engagement flows that as a consequence will increment the audience interaction and simplify processes.

The automation also saves you time by taking on some of your more mindless, repetitive tasks and helps you stay organized by making sure information is transferred accurately between your main event participants.

These tailored engagement loops allow without too much hassle to be connected with participants, mentors, and jury on a more frequent basis by delivering them the most up-to-date information generated during the event, as an example, notify a jury when there is a new project submitted.

Let's Connect TAIKAI to the outside world 🤝

Taking all the feedback that we collected from previous hackathon events, we decided that it was crucial to our future to allow our customers to create their own customized automations and engagement loops and give them some freedom to tailor an outstanding experience for their hackathons.

Apart from the level of customization that these integrations allowed us to achieve, this new capability allows our development team to focus their efforts on features that bring more value to our users since the customizations required for some hackathon events can be crafted by someone without coding skills.

During the last month, the TAIKAI team made a significant update on their platform to allow any hackathon organizer to customize the delivery of events generated on the platform to external services like Zappier, n8n, Automate, IFTTT, automation providers, or customized web services developed by organizers.

These events, generated by the interaction of the users with our platform, are propagated in real time with contextualized information that could be used to automate workflows. Some of the events that are currently propagated to external services are:

  • Participant Registration
  • Jury Registration
  • New Project Submission
  • Hackathon Step Change
  • Project Submission Update
  • Voting Submitted
  • Challenge Update Published
  • ...

Imagine the possibilities that you can bring to the table when you have the freedom to connect the data generated on your hackathon with a set of integrations provided by these no-code platforms.🤩

Imagine the possibilities that you can bring to the table when you have the freedom to connect the data generated on your hackathon with a set of integrations provided by these no-code platforms.🤩

You don’t need to hire a developer, any person with no code skills can design workflows that fit the hackathon needs just by connecting and assembling some pieces.

It is just like Legos. 😲

In the meantime we have prepared a list of recipes and examples that you can incorporate in your event just by using TAIKAI at your hackathon event:

  • Twitter, Slack, Discords Bot - Create a bot that will publish the main hackathon updates, new submissions or inform the participants that a new deadline is approaching.
  • Follow the Hackathon Voting - Gather all the votes and deliver streamlined voting reports or realtime charts to your most important event stakeholders.
  • Fill a Spreadsheet - Fill a spreadsheet with all projects, all votes, and all actions that take place throughout the hackathon.
  • Create calendar events - Create calendar events to notify a participant about a deadline.
  • Create SMS or push notifications - Push mobile notifications to participants, mentors, jury, and organizers when any particular event happens on the platform.

Better Connected than Alone 👫

Composability is a system design principle that deals with the inter-relationships of components. A highly composable system provides components that can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements. In information systems, the essential features that make a component composable are that it be:

  • self-contained (modular): it can be deployed independently – note that it may cooperate with other components, but dependent components are replaceable
  • stateless: it treats each request as an independent transaction, unrelated to any previous request. Stateless is just one technique; managed state and transactional systems can also be composable, but with greater difficulty.
Composability leads inevitably toward more choice, and better user experiences, making it easier to use, or adapting it to new use cases requested by our customers to create delightful online hackathons.

Technology and innovation are progressing at a huge pace, and this growth shows no signs of slowing down, so we are preparing the ground for the future. A future where the TAIKAI platform could be interconnected and talk with a myriad of tools that are created today and tomorrow.

We don't imagine a future where TAIKAI works alone to provide you a full hackathon experience, we imagine a world where a hackathon platform can talk with external APIs and services to deliver an outstanding and customized service that matches your needs.

Conclusion

Organizing a successful hackathon is a challenging effort and without the right tools could be a daunting task for organizations with limited resources and time. By using the right platform and by automating your most important processes you can significantly reduce the amount of time wasted performing data processing and organizing information. In the end, you could spend more time interacting and engaging with your hackathon audience.

TAIKAI makes it possible to automate most of these time-consuming tasks by allowing you to design flows with NoCode platforms like Zapier, n8n, Microsoft Logic Apps, Automate.io, or even design your own customized solutions.

Sounds good right 🤩

Talk with us today, we can help you to design an amazing experience and take your hackathon to the next level. 👌

With TAIKAI the sky is always the limit 🚀

PS: In the upcoming months we will prepare some tutorials and recipes that will help you create amazing automations for your hackathon.

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