Gavel is a project expo judging system.

It was originally built for HackMIT and first used at HackMIT 2015. It's also been used by a number of other hackathons.

Gavel is based on the method of pairwise comparisons. Before you use Gavel, it's highly recommended that you read about the philosophy behind the implementation, as well as hints on how to use it in practice. Read this blog post first, and then read this blog post.

Gavel is currently beta software! We've used it successfully at HackMIT 2015, and a bunch of other hackathons have used it too, but it's still pretty rough around the edges.

If you want to use this for your hackathon or event, we highly recommend that you:

• Deploy it and play around with it ahead of time to get a feel for how the system works
• Take a look at the issues to see the current state of affairs and learn about some things that might be nonintuitive
• Read the blog posts linked above to get a feel for how many judges you need

If you have any questions, feel free to email me.

If you're able to contribute to making Gavel better, that would be awesome! We'd really appreciate pull requests, and we'll include your name in our list of contributors if you contribute any code to Gavel.

If you're interested in working closely with the HackMIT team to make this software better, email us at [email protected] and we can talk about how we can work together!

The web application is written in Python using Flask. It also uses NumPy and SciPy for math stuff. Doing a pip install -r requirements.txt should install all the dependencies.

The application uses Postgres for the database, so you need to have that on your server. You need to create a database, which you can do with createdb gavel (unless you're using a different database name). Before you use the app, you need to initialize the database by running python initialize.py.

When testing, you can run the app with python gavel.py. In production, you should use something like Gunicorn to serve this. You can run the app with gunicorn gavel:app.

Before starting the app, set the following environment variables:

• ADMIN_PASSWORD
• SECRET_KEY - set this to something random
• SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI - you only need to set this if you're doing something nonstandard

Using the admin interface on /admin, input data for all the projects and input information for all the judges.

After that, get the "magic link" to each of the judges. The judge should navigate to http:https://example.com/login/{secret}. This is a bit clunky, and it should be fixed soon: see this issue for details. After the judges navigate to the secret link, they'll be prompted to go through projects and judge them.

If you do end up using this for your competition or hackathon, I would love to hear about how it goes.

If anyone has questions, feel free to email Anish ([email protected]).

Do you have a feature request, bug report, or patch? Great! See CONTRIBUTING.md for information on what you can do about that. We'll include your name in our list of contributors if you contribute any code to Gavel.

Copyright (c) 2015-2016 Anish Athalye. Released under AGPLv3. See LICENSE.txt for details.

If you're interested in getting access to this system under a different license, please contact me.