We were not able to present this project and were disqualified from being considered for any tracks because the HACKAI team was unable to work with DevPost to fetch the required data for track submission. They instead sent out a form on Discord (not even an email), a discord announcement saying that a Google form must be sent out. The first member of the team we were able to talk to threatened to call security on us after we asked to speak with a different member of the team. We even tried to talk to a judge about it and were labeled with harassment of judges and HACKAI officers. Finally, we were able to talk to the organizing officer and the President, who allowed us do a 3-minute pitch in front of the other HACKAI attendees. However, since it was a pitch we were not given enough time to even set up our working robot to give a demo, and had to basically talk about it , limiting our project to basically a zero-progress idea. We would like to say to the HACKAI team that:
- Email should always be sent on information this important, not a Discord notification. Especially when you are changing the way a hackathon is submitted. -Officers didn't know what was going on. For instance, while we were asking for location we should be to set up our project many officers said that we should just wait here and we will be fine. Later we found out that judging had already started in a different building.
-Also, if an officer feels the need to label or threaten our team with words such as "calling security", "harassment", when we are just asking for clarification and the opportunity to speak to a judge, then it makes it very hard to ever want to deal with your organization again.
Overall, very unprofessional handling of the situation.
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