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hack·february 4, 2026·5 min read

c0mpiled-1: Before the Ballot — Post-Mortem

by james tan476 reads

Reflections

  • Good: Having a 2 hour pre-event space for people to arrive, meet, chat about ideas, and form teams.
  • Good: Lighting idea intro round for people to share what they're building and to recruit people to those ideas.
  • Good: Flexible judging structure and rolling submission judging means better
  • Good: Not having a complicated point system with weights
  • Good: Having companies offer their own prizes for tool use, specifically dev tool / infra companies.
  • Good: Judge specific tasks, i.e. reviewing repositories etc.
  • Good: ChatGPT is really helpful in identifying how much food and drink to order
  • Bad: Improve definitions around Most Venture Backable and Biggest technical lift to clarify tradeoffs.
  • Bad: Submission duration still too long, will cap future submissions to 2min max.
  • Bad: Difficult to hear submissions, need to have a dedicated space to record.
  • Bad: Projects without sufficient permissions or without requirements met delay judging.
  • Observation: Creative projects continue to perform well with judges. Projects that tackle the prompt through something novel rather than doing the most obvious thing leave an immediate impression.
  • Observation: When judging 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prizes, what performs well are projects that are not necessarily excellent along a specific dimension (market, pitch, technical, etc) but that strike the perfect balance together.
  • Observation: For the first time we saw AI generated video pitches - overall they were very impressive demonstrations
  • Observation: The vast majority of submissions took a direct approach to the problem or employed dashboard heavy approaches. Submissions that performed well took an approach that employed 1 or 2 elements of a deeper insight beyond just providing content.

Prizes & Recognition

Judges

Judges

All Submissions

Participants

CivicPulse

Candidate Chemistry

ClearVote

Before the Ballot (Game)

Before the Ballot (Research Briefings)

Swing Bills / Swing Bill Watchlist

BallotBridge

Lu + Ale (Source of Truth)

Fulcrum AI

SwipePolitics

VerifyMe / FactCheckMe

AI Mobilizer (Action Compass)

Ashley / Kai (Super Team)

Sims

NeighborlyTurnout

OpenBill

Monitoring the Situation

Walter

Photos








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