WE KICK OPEN-SOURCE PROJECTS INTO HIGH GEAR!
Share your project idea for CloudFest Hackathon 2027!
Ideas First, Polish Later.
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For ten years, the CloudFest Hackathon has brought people together to build projects that give back to the open web. Every project we select shares a few core principles:
Open source: Of course! Code and everything else teams create is shared openly, so others can use it, learn from it, and build on it.
Interoperable: Built on open standards, so it works across systems, platforms, and communities.
Community first: Partners are welcome to support a project and help carry it forward, as long as the result benefits the whole community, not just one company.
Built to last: Every project needs a realistic plan to live on after the hackathon weekend.
Focus Areas for 2027:
For its 10th edition, the CloudFest Hackathon builds on a decade of open-source projects in accessibility, security, CMS improvements, developer tooling, and community platforms. This year we’re looking for projects that shape what comes next for the open web:
– The agent-ready web: open standards and tools like MCP and WebMCP that let AI agents work with websites, CMSs, and hosting platforms safely, instead of just scraping them
– A fair deal between AI and the open web: giving site owners control over how AI crawls, uses, cites and pays for their content
– Trust you can verify: open evals, guardrails, content credentials and watermark verification that make AI behaviour measurable and AI output traceable
– Secure by default: defending against prompt injection and supply-chain attacks, and making vulnerability handling manageable for every maintainer
– Sovereign, efficient infrastructure: self-hostable stacks and local-first AI that runs in the browser or on your own servers, keeping the web independent and affordable
Whether your project lives in WordPress, another CMS, a PHP or JavaScript framework, or the hosting stack beneath them all, we want to hear from you. Creative, unconventional ideas are just as welcome as infrastructure work.
We’re especially interested in projects that tackle real-world challenges in hosting, cloud infrastructure, security, accessibility, content management, developer experience, and web standards. That includes the obligations web builders now face under the EU AI Act, the Cyber Resilience Act, and the European Accessibility Act, which are best met with open tooling everyone can use and verify. As always, projects should live on well beyond the hackathon weekend, so tell us how you imagine yours continuing.
Not sure your idea is ready? Submit it anyway, or talk to us first. Every project is refined together with a mentor before the event.
To encourage friendly competition between projects, a jury will pick a winner in six categories. True to our ethos, the sponsored award money goes to Groundbreaker Talents, the educational initiative the CloudFest Hackathon has supported for years.
Meet our 2027 Project Mentors!
Got a great idea for a hackathon project? Wondering about its trajectory post-hackathon? You won’t be sailing this ship alone:
Alain Schlesser
Software Engineer
Google Developer Expert & WP-CLI Maintainer
Lucas Radke
Product Manager at Automattic—WordPress VIP
Simon Kraft
Product Manager, Full Stack Developer,
Blogger, Author, and Podcaster
Marcel Schmitz
Founder & Principal Architect at Pluginslab
Codeable Expert
We’ve assembled a dedicated team bringing together decades of open-source expertise. Alain Schlesser, Lucas Radke, Simon Kraft and Marcel Schmitz will work closely with project leads in 2027.
Their combined experience and expertise will be invaluable in transforming your ideas into well-defined, impactful projects and guiding you towards successful implementation during the event. Whether you need help refining your project scope or achievable objectives, planning your resources, or maximizing your team’s efficiency, our project mentors are here to help.
Reach out to us at hackathon@cloudfest.com, and we will guide you through the process.
Ideas First, Polish Later.
We’re looking for strong ideas, not perfect pitches. If you have something in mind that fits this year’s themes, don’t hold back just because it isn’t fully worked out yet. Tell us what you want to build and why it matters, and we’ll take it from there. We review every submission, and if we decide to move forward with your idea, you’ll work with one of our project mentors to shape, refine, and polish it before the event.
Would you rather talk it through first? Email us at hackathon@cloudfest.com, and we’ll get back to you to brainstorm together.
The call for projects is open now!
Looking For Inspiration?
Browse through our showcase of groundbreaking projects from CloudFest Hackathon 2024, 2025, and 2026, and see what kind of magic happens when we bring together brilliant minds!
