Hacktoberfest Hack Day Gwalior x ITM University
About
🚀 Open Source Hack Day — Hacktoberfest 2026
BUILD. CONTRIBUTE. COLLABORATE.
Ready to go beyond tutorials and make something real?
Join us for a hands-on Open Source Hack Day where you’ll learn how modern open-source development works, build with real technologies, collaborate through GitHub, and turn your ideas into working projects.
Whether you’re making your first open-source contribution or already comfortable with Git and GitHub, there’s a way for you to participate.
🧑💻 What You’ll Experience
You’ll work with real, organizer-maintained GitHub projects and learn the complete contribution workflow:
Explore → Understand → Build → Test → Pull Request → Review
Depending on your experience level, you’ll tackle challenges involving:
Feature development
Bug fixing and debugging
Testing and reliability
Documentation
Security
Performance
Refactoring and code quality
The event is structured across five difficulty levels — Novice, Beginner, Competent, Proficient and Expert — allowing participants to take on challenges appropriate to their experience.
🔥 More Than Just Open Source Contributions
Hack Day also includes official MLH prize challenges, giving participants the opportunity to build and demonstrate projects using open-source and open-weight AI.
🏆 Best Open-Source AI Project
Build an original project where open-source or open-weight AI plays an important role.
💎 Best Use of Gemma 4
Build an innovative project using Google’s Gemma 4 through the Gemini API.
These challenges are part of the official Hacktoberfest Hack Day program and have their own eligibility, submission and judging requirements.
🌱 What You’ll Learn
By the end of the event, you’ll have practical experience with:
Git & GitHub
Open-source contribution workflows
Issues, branches and Pull Requests
Debugging and testing
Code review
Software development practices
Open-source and open-weight AI
Building and presenting working projects
🎯 Who Can Participate?
Everyone.
You don’t need to be an experienced open-source contributor. Whether you’re completely new to GitHub, have made a few contributions, or are already an experienced developer, you can participate at a level suited to your experience.
Bring your laptop, curiosity and willingness to build.
🚀 Don’t Just Learn Open Source. Experience It.
Explore real projects.
Solve real problems.
Build real things.
Make your contribution count.
BUILD. CONTRIBUTE. COLLABORATE.
📅 16 October 2026 | 🕘 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM
📍 ITM University
Prize Categories
2 categories- View Best Use of Gemma 4DDeepmind Google
Best Use of Gemma 4
It’s time to see how much you can build with a lightweight, open model. Gemma 4 packs multimodal intelligence into an open-weights model that you can access through the Gemini API. So, what can Gemma 4 bring to your project?
- Multimodal Experience: Work with text and images to create an assistant that understands more of what users share.
- Focused AI Tools: Build a focused AI tool for learning, creativity, productivity, or your community.
- Rapid Prototyping: Experiment with an open model while using the Gemini API to move quickly from an idea to a working prototype.
Bring your idea to life… what will you build with Gemma 4 today?
Build with Gemma 4View category - View Best Open-Source AI Project
Best Open-Source AI Project
Exclusive Hacktoberfest 2026 Winner DEV Badge & MLH Swag Bag
Build an original project that uses open-source or open-weight AI as an important part of how it works. Teams could create an agent skill, build with an open-weight large or small language model, or build or adapt an open-source model harness. These are examples within one challenge, and teams may combine them.
Open-source or open-weight AI must be an important part of the project.
The project must be published in a public GitHub repository and use an open-source license.
An agent skill must comply with the Agent Skill Open Standard.
A model-harness entry must include an original implementation or meaningful changes to an existing open-source harness.
Build with DigitalOceanView category
