The jury of the online WHOIS Hackathon, organised last weekend (25th and 26th September) by the Serbian National Internet Domain Name Registry Foundation (RNIDS) and Quantox Technology, was faced with no small task – to choose the winner of the hackathon from amongst stiff competition.
Redtech Zemare took first place – a team comprising programmers Milan Cupać, Željko Lučić, Igor Stevanović, Andrija Jelenković and Damjan Denić. Second place were Comfortably Dumb, comprising David Milinković, Pavle Pađin, Ivan Jevtić and Mihailo Trajković, who were virtually neck-and-neck with the third-placed team of Trošica, consisting of Janko Đurić, Natalija Ostojić, Željko Milojević, Janko Mirković and Željko Kosovac.
As the jury – comprising Petar Slović, director of innovations of Quantox Technology, Damjan Tomić, technical director of IT Biz Solutions, and Dušan Stojičević, Gransy, fomer vice-Chair of the Universal Acceptance Group (UASG) – emphasised multiple times as they were presenting the hackathon solutions on 27th September, there was very little to separate the winners. All ten of the teams selected for the competition delivered fully functional mobile phone apps providing WHOIS and DNS data on available and registered domain names (both Cyrillic and Latin) in the given domain spaces. Many teams went a step further, including additional TLDs and more data (e.g. the postal code of the registrar). It was interesting to note the different approach each team took towards the project assignment, using quite different technologies, and the jury noted some very innovative solutions such as the use of a chat bot.
A number of parameters were taken into consideration when grading the entries – completeness and relevance of the solution, UI/UX design, code quality and the scalability and presentation of the solution. The highest grades given to these parameters determined the winners.
The hackathon was supported by ICANN, the organisation that administers the global address structure of the Internet, and by its Universal Acceptance initiative, which was established with the goal of promoting the equal treatment of all domain names and email addresses on the Internet by software applications, regardless of the written script used. The hackathon participants confirmed that working with Cyrillic domains presented no problems, and once more affirmed the fact that universal acceptance can be achieved if there is a will to do so, because there are no technical hurdles.