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Join Us for Hacktoberfest 2021!

Hit pause on the corn mazes and the PSLs. The real highlight of fall is here – Hacktoberfest. We are excited to celebrate the open-source community and invite you to help us improve Microsoft's ElectionGuard. Whether you are an experienced dev or brand new at this, there are opportunities for all!

Keith Fung

• 2 min read
Join Us for Hacktoberfest 2021!

It’s that time of year again. Hacktoberfest. The annual online celebration of all things open-source. I love the open-source community and it’s been awesome to get more devs to learn about and contribute work to ElectionGuard.

This year is shaping up to be our best yet. We have new tech for you to explore in our repos and more opportunities to explore how the is code evolving.

Read on for a quick tour of what we have going on this year. And feel free to hit me up any time with questions on Twitter.

What is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest, hosted by DigitalOcean, is an annual celebration of all the great people and tech that make up the open-source community. All month long, software devs of every skill level are invited to contribute to open-source projects by sharing a project, contributing to others via pull requests, organizing events, mentoring new folks, and donating money directly to open-source projects

All the rules and regulations are listed here.

What is ElectionGuard?

ElectionGuard is the result of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program's steadfast work to help make voting more secure and transparent. ElectionGuard is an open-source SDK designed to enable end-to-end verification of elections, share results with third parties, and allow voters to confirm their votes were counted.

I’ve been working with this tech for almost two years now and I can say it’s one of the most exciting things I’ve ever been a part of. Someday it just might change how we choose our elected officials.

ElectionGuard has been successful road-tested in Fulton, WI and in the US House of Representatives. The tech is ever evolving, which is why we get involved with Hacktoberfest and ask the dev community to kick the tires and help us make it even better.

How can you get involved?

ElectionGuard was designed with community in mind. We’d love for you join our community, take a look at the documentation, work on issues, or build your own verifier.

Start here https://www.electionguard.vote/hacktoberfest/.

You can hop into our repositories, join our office hours, or just learn about the project.

All the links...

For the tl;dr crew, here are all the important links in one handy list.

Thanks for reading and happy hacking!