Mon Dec 2, 2013 16:34 Share
Salesforce has responded to cries of foul play in its $1 million hackathon by announcing that while winning team Upshot didn’t cheat, judges weren’t given sufficient info to select a winner so it’s giving $1 million to each of the top two finalists, Upshot and Healthcare.love.
Below is the email that Salesforce’s Adam Seligman just sent to all participants of the Salesforce1 Hackathon at last month’s Dreamforce conference.
– Forwarded message —-
From: “Adam Seligman” <aseligman@salesforce.com>
Date: Dec 2, 2013 1:22 PM
Subject: Update on the Salesforce1 Hackathon internal review
To: “Adam Seligman” <aseligman@salesforce.com>, “April Kyle Nassi” <anassi@salesforce.com>
Cc:
I want to thank you personally for participating in the Salesforce1 Hackathon. We had a great time throwing the event, seeing the hard work from the developer community, and seeing the live final round judging process.
But we also heard your feedback and I wanted to let you know that we took your concerns seriously. We conducted a review led by our internal audit team into the hackathon judging process and eligibility of the top finalists. We just announced our response to your feedback, based on our internal review here:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/salesforcecom-announces-two-1-million-winning-teams-for-the-salesforce1-hackathon-2013-12-02
What we determined was that the winning team met eligibility requirements, and their use of pre-existing code was allowed under the rules. What we also found was that we did not adequately equip the final round judges to evaluate the entries that contained pre-existing code. Because we are unable to determine if this would have changed the outcome of the final round of judging, we decided that the appropriate outcome is to declare a tie, and award each of the top two teams, Upshot and Healthcare.love, with the grand prize of $1 million. Both Upshot and Healthcare.love built incredible apps on the Salesforce1 Platform and both deserve to be recognized.
We also heard your concerns about the transparency of the judging process. We should have been more transparent about our process and provided feedback to you. I just posted a blog (http://blogs.developerforce.com/developer-relations/2013/12/update-on-salesforce1-hackathon-feedback-review.html) addressing this issue because we want to be transparent about the issues we heard from you and explain how we made our decisions.
We made some mistakes, and we will be taking your feedback into the next hackathon, which we are planning now.
If you have any questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Adam
TechCrunch will have more information on the news shortly.
