IndieWeb Hackathon

From IndieWeb


The IndieWeb Hackathon is a recurring event encouraging contributions to software projects in the IndieWeb community.

Why

An IndieWeb hackathon will help motivate more development on community projects and spur discussion of IndieWeb standards

How to

Each month, the hackathon has a different project. At the beginning of the month, the host maintainer shares about the project and elicits contributions. People can contribute in various ways including writing code, trying features, and triaging issues.

Hosting

The whole process is open to change, so any suggestions welcome.

Any person having their own website is eligible to become a host. You can be the host just once or you can repeat multiple times.

If you want to volunteer as the future host, please add your name to the below list of future hosts. One does not need to decide on the topic until posting the call for submission.

If you changed your mind and you do not want to host, simply remove yourself from the list. That way some other people can volunteer for that month. As long as the months did not yet start or is about to start in less than a week, there is nothing else needed done.

If you are in that time frame, then please contact the person who started this carnival ( Anthony Ciccarello - email: anthony@ciccarello.me or aciccarello in chat) to arrange for the replacement.

If the month you are assigned started and you did not post a call of submission before or in a first couple of days of the month, your spot will be taken by one of the pinch hitter hosts.

The List of Future Hosts

2026

Month Language Project Host
January JS Omnibear  Anthony Ciccarello
February

Pinch-Hitter Hosts

If you want to be a host but do not want to commit to it for a specific month, you can add yourself to the pinch hitters list. A pinch hitter fills in if a scheduled host has to back out, or if there is a month without a host. In that scenario, we will try to find a host from this list.

By adding yourself and your project to the list below, you only indicate that you are willing to be asked to host on short-term notice. It does not mean that you need to accept it at that time.

Project Ideas

  • Parsers
  • IndieWeb hosts
  • Webmention infrastructure
  • Micropub clients
  • Developer tools

Requested Projects

These are projects that non-maintainers would like to see host.

Current rules (can be changed in the future)

Default rules for the host

Hosting an event primarily involves making it easy for new contributors to jump in, responding to issues, merging PRs, and releasing new versions. The hope is that hosting will bring more contributors and spur development beyond that months event. In order to ensure that people know how they can help, there are a few requirements.

Requirements

  1. Projects must be nominated by one of the maintainers of the project.
  2. Projects must be IndieWeb adjacent (using community standards like microformats, webmentions, micropub, etc.)
  3. Make sure your project has basic documentation and contributing instructions (a readme is fine)
  4. Be generally available and responsive during the event, ideally able to respond within 48 hours.

Hosting instructions

See the wiki for the latest instructions, but the initial process is as follows.

  1. Add your project to the event wiki page
  2. Update your project's page on the IndieWeb wiki
  3. Create a blog post and/or GitHub issue announcing the event and communicating some key contribution information:
    1. Top priorities for contributions
    2. Good places for people to start or Good First Issues
    3. Communication preferences
    4. Basic contribution guide
  4. Publicize the event on IndieNews and in the #indieweb-dev chat
  5. Respond to inquiries and review/merge PRs
  6. Release or deploy any new changes
  7. Consider hosting a "hack day" event such as a weekend virtual meeting where people can join and collaborate
  8. After the event publish a blog post and/or release announcement recognizing the participants of the event

Default rules for the participants

There are multiple ways to participate in a hackathon. This includes projects where you don't know the programming language! If you are just getting started, reviewing open issues or improving documentation is a great place to start. If you are a little more comfortable with the language, consider addressing a small bug or reviewing open PRs.

Before jumping in, please review and follow the maintainer's contribution guidelines. They should provide some guidance to help you get started and to avoid your changes getting rejected. So rewriting large portions of a project for no real benefit probably is not a welcome place to start. It is also worth searching a projects open and closed issues to see if an item has previously been discussed. Following project recommendations ensures your participation is helpful and doesn't add an undue burden on the maintainer.

Some ideas for how to contribute include:

  1. Review and triage open issues and PRs
  2. Attempt to reproduce open bug reports and report your findings!
  3. Improve the project documentation
  4. Improve project test coverage
  5. Add support for the latest version of IndieWeb specifications
  6. Fix a bug
  7. File a new bug report or feature request
  8. Implement a new feature
  9. Install and try out the project or library
  10. Write a blog post about your participation, what you accomplished and/or learned.
  11. Consider becoming a regular contributor or even joining as a maintainer
  12. Donate financially to the project and it's maintainers

History

Started as based on the discussion in the 2025/SD/opensource session.

See Also