Salesforce.com has initiated an investigation into whether its hackathon contest that awarded $1 million to two Harvard University alumni on November 21 during its Dreamforce Conference, was rigged. The controversy erupted a day after the announcement of winners, when developers who participated in the said contest argued that the rules were broken and that some entries were not even opened by judges.
The judges of the hackathon considered the design, user experience, and the seamless integration with the platform of Salesforce to declare the winning application. The huge prize was awarded to Thom Kim and Joseph Thurian who collaborated to create Upshot, an application that allows salespeople to create and tweak reports as needed on the go.
Apparently, angry participants pointed out that the winning entry was not created from scratch as the hackathon rules required. Salesforce rules stated that participating developers can begin work on their entries October 25. Upshot was apparently shown and demoed during a Salesforce meetup in San Francisco on October 8.
In response to all the complaints, Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff said that they will look into the matter.
"We are doing full review of the Salesfoce1 Hackathon, & will address every issue raised by the community," he said through a tweet.
We are doing a full review of the Salesforce1 Hackathon, & will address every issue raised by the community. https://t.co/shXgeJzvDe
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) November 23, 2013
There were also developers who complained that Kim was a former employee of Salesforce and knew the platform, giving him an advantage over other developers. "The winning team presented their project at a Meetup well before the Hackathon was even announced...Which is totally against the official rules for the Hacktahon, which stated "The application you or your team submits must: have been developed solely as part of this Hackathon," said a certain Zulfishah on Hacker News.
"People also complaining that their apps didn't get any hits during the evaluation period [1]. If this is true, which it seems like to be, it is pretty shameful business from Salesforce given that people clearly used a decent part of their week in order to participate. I feel bad for Heroku employees who promoted this... According to one of the judges [2], they only saw and evaluated the 5 Salesforce selected apps. Also the app gallery only shows the five winners [3]. No matter how the finalists were chosen, this is not how you run a hackathon," another comment from a user registered as Jorde stated.
Other winners of the Salesforce hackathon include Healthcare.lov that bagged the $50,000 prize for second place; Hirebase ($25,000); Salesfetch ($10,000); and 2lemetry ($5,000).
Salesforce also addressed some concerns through its official blog. "When it came to judging the apps, we wanted to conduct multiple independent reviews of every eligible submission. So we assembled a team of more than 80 judges, and used a team of expert developers to assist each judge's evaluation of apps as needed. Every eligible app entry was reviewed at least twice," Adam Siegman of Salesforce wrote. Siegman added that the company will post its findings online once the review process of the final entries is done.
All said and done, many developers praised Benioff's call to action. "Great job by @salesforce and @Benioff in managing the Salesforce1 $1m Hackathon foul play aligations," Harry Bohosian tweeted.
Great job by @salesforce and @Benioff in managing the Salesforce1 $1m Hackathon foul play aligations. https://t.co/VSwGeEEKEs — Harry Bohosian (@hbohosian) November 25, 2013
"@benioff - That's awesome! This is why you are such a stud - way to be proactive!" tweeted Ash Vaidya.
@benioff - That's awesome! This is why you are such a stud - way to be proactive!
— Ash Vaidya (@a_vaidya) November 25, 2013
