FAQ

A hackathon is a community event where people from all disciplines—students, faculty, advocates, artists, and more—come together to rapidly design solutions to a given challenge. This is not simply a competition; it is an opportunity to build connections, collaborate with others, and engage in critical problem-solving. In a typical hackathon, teams are formed at the event and are given a problem to solve within a set timeframe. Our hackathon will take place over approximately three days and will not run overnight. The term "hackathon" originated from computer scientists working together to build and code projects. However, this event goes beyond technology and welcomes participants from all backgrounds and disciplines. At the end of the hackathon, prizes will be awarded to the team or teams whose solutions demonstrate outstanding creativity, impact, and productivity.

This hackathon is a social justice hackathon because of our collaboration with local communities and businesses. The "problems" or challenges that you will be presented with will be actual issues facing local businesses and communities, such as not having a proper website, not having a proper way to gain traction/awareness, or a financial issue that can be solved by something coded.

Because of the amount of collaboration there will be with local communities, we will need people of all different skillsets on the team to make judgement calls. For example, if the final product was to create an app that tracks food stamps, there would need to be people who understand local policy to get the correct information for the app, people who understand how to make an app a user friendly experience in terms of graphic design and marketing, people who understand how to do the actual coding, and so on! We will need creative and critical thinkers from all disciplines who want real-world experience in problem-solving and collaboration. We are focusing on the idea that in order to create something great there needs to be diverse minds working on it!

This is open to all WWU students and alumni who graduated in the span of five years of this hackathon. There will be roughly 50 participants, forming teams of around five or six people.

Each team will have meals provided, Wifi, private meeting rooms with computers, and possibly merch goodies!

Our hackathon will start on a Friday night, where there will be a keynote speaker and an introductory social event where contestants can mingle and form teams. They will get their challenge and make a rough outline of their plan. Dinner will be provided. On Saturday, the teams will come back and work/hack throughout the entire day. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner will be provided. This will be the least structured day, as it is up to the individual teams to collaborate and get the job done. Sunday will be the final day of the hackathon, where teams will finish up their product. They will each present their progress to the judges, and while the judges decide there will be a brief social with tabling from local communities, music, and some food. Finally, there will be the closing ceremonies where winners will be announced.

The goal of this hackathon is social good, and therefore there are many aspects of modern AI tools, and the companies that offer them, that contradict the core values of this hackathon. Therefore, while we can’t possibly control how AI is used by contestants, we encourage teams to take the opportunity to code and test as it was done prior to the advent of LLMs.

It is free to attend!