One Hackathon, $7K in Prizes, $100 For Merged PR: 10 Days To Build
The fastest organizations are no longer competing only on how quickly they ship code. They are racing to keep data legible across services so dashboards, models, and audits point at the same facts, and metadata is the layer where that alignment actually happens. Adoption of unified catalogs and serious lineage tooling keeps climbing because the cost of invisible data debt shows up in outages, wrong metrics, and AI features trained on fields nobody can name.
Back To The Metadata Hackathon at a Glance
Back to the metadata hackathon banner
Everything you need to register and ship is on the hackathon hub, and if you want to help push discovery, observability, or governance forward instead of reading about adoption from the sidelines, we want you in the room.
- 10 days on the clock to build any project using OpenMetadata (April 17–26, 2026)
- $7,000 in prizes, with Apple MacBooks, iPads, and Keychron keyboards for every member of top teams
- $100 per merged qualifying pull request on the contribution track (good-first-issue)
- Interview opportunities at Collate for standout work, plus participation certificates
- Swag boxes for ten randomly drawn participants who star the OpenMetadata repo on GitHub and share that they joined
From AI agents and MCP tooling to data quality checks and governance workflows, the range of what you can ship is wide, and we expect the same creativity this community brings to every WeMakeDevs hackathon. More than competing for prizes alone, we want people to document their journey, post updates, and help each other in the open before the clock runs out. That is how a short sprint still feels like building in public.
You do not need prior experience with OpenMetadata to take part. The sections below spell out the tracks, prizes, and how to register so you can start from where you are and use the community channels when you get stuck.
Data Market Is Compounding
Market research on data usage
- People still cannot find the data they need: Gartner surveyed 4,861 full-time employees and found 47% struggle to find the information required to perform their jobs effectively. The same work noted knowledge workers use an average of 11 applications compared with 6 in 2019. More tools without a shared catalog usually means more silos, not fewer.
- The data catalog market is compounding: Independent market studies that cover the global data catalog segment often place it around USD 1.5 billion in the mid-2020s and project compound annual growth rates frequently quoted between about 20% and 30% into the early 2030s, with several published forecasts pointing to a multi-billion dollar category by that horizon.
- AI makes weak metadata expensive: Retrieval, copilots, and agents amplify whatever context you feed them. When column definitions, lineage, and policy tags are wrong or stale, model output looks confident and is still wrong.
If those trends match what your leadership deck already claims, this hackathon is a hands-on way to build where the spend and attention are going.
Opportunity, Careers, And The Job Market
- Hiring for people who ship code is still strong: Widely cited projections put employment growth for software developers, QA analysts, and testers around 15% over a ten-year window, well above the average for all occupations. Data-platform work sits in that same bucket.
- Roles that touch catalogs and lineage are everywhere on job boards: Companies hiring data platform engineers, analytics engineers, ML platform engineers, and governance specialists need people who understand how tables connect, how pipelines break, and how policy meets production. Those job descriptions increasingly read like the feature list of OpenMetadata, not like a generic CRUD app.
- The market problem is not solved: As long as 47% of workers still struggle to find the information they need (per Gartner above) and AI spend keeps rising, employers will pay for people who can make data discoverable and trustworthy. Building in this hackathon is practice on the exact class of problem those budgets are meant to address.
Why OpenMetadata And Why Now?
Using metadata to streamline the organisation data
Most teams add new tables, jobs, and dashboards faster than anyone can write the story of how they connect. That gap is how two charts can show different answers for the same metric, or how a new engineer spends a week learning which pipeline actually feeds production. OpenMetadata is an open platform that keeps discovery, observability, and governance in one place so people can look up assets, follow lineage, and apply policies from a single source of truth instead of scattered notes and tribal knowledge.
The platform is open source, developed in public with community contributions, while Collate backs hosted and enterprise deployments when teams want official support. Connectors pull metadata from databases, warehouses, and BI tools into one catalog, where lineage, data quality, and governance sit next to full API access, so people can trace data, apply policies, and integrate other systems without maintaining a separate shadow catalog.
Choose Your Timeline: The Six Paradoxes
We grouped project ideas into six tracks so you are not staring at a blank page. Think of them as alternate timelines you can repair, not boxes you must stay inside.
Hackathon project idea example
- MCP Ecosystem and AI Agents: If you want to explore how models and tools talk to metadata in natural language, auto-classification, smarter discovery, or assistants that know your catalog better than your newest hire, this is your lane.
- Data Observability: Dashboards, alerts, anomaly hooks, anything that makes something looks wrong visible before it becomes someone on Slack is panicking.
- Connectors and Ingestion: New sources, better ingestion paths, ETL-shaped glue, anything that gets reality into the catalog without manual babysitting.
- Developer Tooling and CI/CD: CLIs, GitHub Actions, IDE affordances, the boring infrastructure that makes the right thing the easy thing.
- Community and Comms: Bots, notifications, lightweight dashboards that keep humans aligned when metadata changes.
- Governance and Classification: Tagging, PII workflows, policy-shaped automation, the work that stops your future self from apologizing to legal.
You can browse a fuller idea board on GitHub from the hackathon page if you want prompts that are more specific than build something cool.
Prizes That Hurt If You Lose Them
We put seven thousand dollars in prizes on the table, and we structured rewards so they do not punish collaboration. Teams can be up to four people, and every member of a winning team gets the full prize tier, not a split that makes you regret helping a friend.
Top placements earn Apple MacBooks, iPads, and Keychron keyboards, the kind of gear you can use to level up your productivity. Top winners also get interview opportunities with Collate, the company behind OpenMetadata.
There is a side quest too: star the OpenMetadata repository on GitHub, post about taking part, and you enter a draw where ten random participants get swag boxes. It is a small nudge for people who spread the word while they build.
Not everyone wants to optimize for a demo day narrative. If your instinct is to land real improvements in the project itself, there is a contribution track that pays a hundred dollars per merged pull request that closes an issue labeled good-first-issue. It is a straightforward way to earn while you learn the codebase, and it runs alongside the main build track instead of replacing it.
Your Roadmap To Winning
Hackathon winning roadmap
These four moves line up with how judges think about submissions. Treat them as your plan, not a vague wish list.
- Start from a real problem: In the data ecosystem that you can name in one sentence. Vague nice to have ideas rarely survive scoring.
- Push past the first idea: Creativity and innovation are weighted heavily, so the obvious path is rarely the winning path.
- Put OpenMetadata at the center: Deep integration with APIs, ingestion, lineage, or governance beats a thin wrapper that barely touches the platform.
- Tell the story: A clear README plus a demo that shows the problem before the fix often decides placement when scores are close.
Not shipping a full project? Pick an issue labeled good-first-issue on the OpenMetadata repo, get your pull request merged on the contribution track, and earn $100 per qualifying merge.
Check all four boxes on the build track and you are in the running for the $7,000 prize pool.
Hackathon Checklist
Run through this in order so you are set up before you deep dive into code.
- Register for the hackathon (open till April 26, 2026)
- Star the OpenMetadata repository on GitHub
- Read the hackathon rules so your submission matches what judges expect
- Work through the resources and local setup guides
- Join the OpenMetadata Slack for technical questions and discussion
- Post about your participation on social media for a chance at the swag box draw
Cross these off and you are ahead of the pack. Let us make data easier to find, trust, and use.
Social Buzz And Why Community Matters
Senior engineers joining the hackathon and community
People are already talking about Back to the Metadata on X and LinkedIn. Follow the WeMakeDevs and OpenMetadata accounts and search for the hackathon name if you want a feel for who is in before you register.
The OpenMetadata Slack is not optional, it is where integration questions get answered quickly, where maintainers and contributors show up, and where you can see the range of people building alongside you. Recent intros include senior full stack engineers with many years in finance and banking who said they want to participate, not only students or first-time hackathon entrants. When experienced folks join the same channels, threads go deeper, code review style feedback shows up earlier, and you have a better shot at finding a teammate who has already shipped data platforms in production.
If you have not joined Slack yet, treat checklist step five as a priority. Say hello, skim the hackathon threads, and ask your hardest technical question early while there is still room on the calendar before submissions close.
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