&quot;There are a lot of teams who bring their existing projects to the party&quot;<p>I wonder if this can be approached with rules, such as:<p>* Provide datasets, interesting hardware, or other things that the participants do not have in advance. Release them only at the start of the hackathon. In the judging criteria, have heavy weighting for how well the teams make use of the provided resources.<p>* Forbid, on honor code, to bring your startup (or any other project you have started before) to the hackathon.<p>* Prohibit, on honor code, use of any code written prior to the hackathon unless said code has been under an open source license for 3 months, advertised and available for the public to download, AND your team does not represent the majority of the contributions to said code.<p>* Define one or more problems to solve, within the scope of the hackathon. Don&#x27;t release the problems until the start of the hackathon. Require all teams to work on a solution to any of the stated problems.