From April 26 through May 3, OSN hosted the first OSMT hackathon with the goal to build community and foster innovation around open skills. The week-long virtual event brought the OSN community together through a collaborative effort to improve our open skills management tool, focusing on five key areas: bug fixes, improvements, integrations, leveraging RSDs, and innovation. OSN is thankful for the community effort to bring our hackathon to fruition and would especially like to highlight the Walmart Foundation and Western Governors University for their funding and support. Let’s dive into the judging process, each of the five categories, and their winning submissions!
Judging: Submissions in each category were evaluated on technical compliance, innovation, and usefulness. Technical compliance was achieved when submissions executed correctly, maintained the security of OSMT, and improved upon and led the existing level of documentation in the OSMT code base. Innovation looked for a submission that met an existing need, extended OSMT functionality, allowed for customization, or made OSMT more scalable. Submissions that were easily understood or applicable for both tech and non-tech audiences or provided further extensions possible in the future also scored well. Usefulness criteria included submissions that were useful to the full OSN community and potentially beyond, to multiple contexts and systems. Additional criteria included user interface design, accessibility, and efficiency contributions.
OSMT bug bounties: Leading up to the hackathon, our OSMT engineers identified a list of bugs that were prioritized for teams to tackle. These included a range of items from changing the font color of a certain area to validating job codes when importing new collections. Anyone who solved a bug and checked in their code first could win prize money for this category, while an overall winner was the team that solved the most bugs. Our winner for the bug bounties category, Nate Otto, solved four bugs during the hackathon. Congratulations to Nate! OSN sends appreciation for all the contributions to OSMT bugs during the hackathon!
OSMT Improvements: This category was open to the participants to create their own improvements to OSMT and its source code. Nate Otto of Skybridge Skills, the winner in this category, focused on AWS Cloud Deployment. This offers a new approach using AWS services for an efficient, affordable, and safe OSMT deployment. This is incredibly valuable for organizations using and wanting to stand up their own instance of OSMT.
Integrations: In this category, participants were encouraged to integrate existing tools and systems with OSMT in creative and innovative ways. Nate Otto of Skybridge Skills, the winner in this category, integrated the Credential Registry with the OSMT Skills Library. This provides users the ability to publish their library of skills from their OSMT server or collection to the Credential Registry. It supports an initial publication of skills and an update of the same skills to the registry.
Leveraging RSDs: As RSDs are the heart of OSMT, submissions in this category used RSDs in different applications and contexts. Our winning team from Youni, led by George Paragioudakis, developed a feature that allows users to attach RSDs to courses that they post. This allows employers, teachers, and students to have a common language with which to discuss the skills associated with classes on Youni. Classes on Youni must be sponsored by employers, so the RSDs receive credibility in the context of the course and all future credentials that are issued from it.
Innovation Prize: This was an overall prize, and all submissions were eligible to win this award that would be given to the most impactful and creative submission. Congratulations to Nate Otto of Skybridge Skills, our winner of the innovation prize! His submission to OSMT Improvements has immense potential for impact as it breaks down barriers to hosting an OSMT instance and can lead to greater adoption of RSDs and OSMT!
Thanks to our OSN hackathon team and participants for a successful event, and congratulations to our winners!