Overview
Developers Wilding: Online is a two-week online hackathon run by Mozilla.ai as part of MozFest. It starts on October 28, the same day MozFest begins in Barcelona, and ends on November 11. The hackathon encourages developers to finish side projects they already have, with one main requirement: the project must use Otari.ai as its hosted AI gateway.
Who should attend
The event is aimed at developers who have an unfinished side project and want to try Otari. Participants do not need to start something new. The organizers ask people to start a new branch in their project and build with Otari.ai.
About Otari
Otari, by Mozilla.ai, is an open-source AI infrastructure platform for building applications and agents with the models you choose, including open-weight models. The page highlights code execution, web search, and the ability to connect your own tools. It is presented as a way to avoid being locked into a single frontier AI provider. Participants use the hosted platform at Otari.ai, and because Otari is open source, it can be run on your own infrastructure after the hackathon.
Prizes
- 1st place: $1,000 and 3 hours with Mozilla.ai engineers
- 2nd place: $200 and 2 hours with Mozilla.ai engineers
- 3rd place: 1 hour with Mozilla.ai engineers
Winners can use this time for mentoring, questions about their project, and feedback from experts.
How to participate
- Register by email. Send your name or pseudonym, the email you will use for Otari.ai, and one sentence describing your project to marcus+wilding@mozilla.org. You will receive a confirmation email before October 28. Creating an Otari.ai account alone does not enter you in the hackathon.
- Sign up at Otari.ai. The first 200 people to sign up receive $20 in tokens.
- Join the Mozilla OSAI Discord. Grant yourself the devs-wilding role to receive updates and ask questions.
- Star the Otari repository on GitHub at mozilla-ai/otari.
- Start building. Create a new branch in your project and build with Otari.ai.
The hackathon rubric lists the Otari features you can use and explains how projects are evaluated.
Submission requirements
The deadline is November 11 at 11:59 PM. To submit, reply to your sign-up email thread with marcus+wilding@mozilla.org and include:
- The project name, the email used for Otari.ai, and a one-line description of the project
- A link to your public GitHub repository and the name of your hackathon branch
- A link to the first commit on that branch where Otari was used
- The Otari features you used, as listed in the rubric
- Any pull requests or issues you opened on the Otari repository
- A link to a 3 to 5 minute project demo video
- Your feedback, as a screen recording, written answers, or both
Submissions missing these items will not be eligible for prizes.
Feedback
The feedback screen recording should last 3 to 5 minutes. It should cover what you built and which features you used, what worked well, what did not work (including bugs and friction, with reproduction steps if possible), and what is missing or what you would change.
Written feedback asks when you were most tempted to skip Otari and call the provider directly, what you ended up building yourself that Otari should have handled, and whether you would have kept using Otari if the rules had not required it.
Questions
Ask questions in the Mozilla OSAI Discord. Grab the devs-wilding role and tag @Marcus, the hackathon organizer.
