City of Seattle Youth Connector Hackathon
City of Seattle’s Innovation & Performance team is hosting a hackathon for Youth Connector, a new initiative and web app designed to improve awareness and access to youth and young adult enrichment programs across the greater Seattle area. This is the first in a new series of Community Innovation Hackathons the City of Seattle will be hosting in partnership with the AI House.
Last year, research conducted by the City of Seattle found that while enrichment programs play a critical role in student mental health and well-being, the top barrier young people face is simply knowing what opportunities exist. To address this, hackathon participants will be challenged to design AI-powered agents, workflows, or computational tools that can transform unstructured data from websites and social media into a reliable, regularly updated catalog of programs. The goal is to make it easier for youth to discover activities that fit their schedules and interests, with accurate details on availability, location, transportation, and more.
The Community Innovation Hackathon Series is a new initiative that brings together students, entrepreneurs, technologists, public servants, and community members to co-create solutions to tough problems facing the City of Seattle. Future hackathons in the series will explore other civic challenges including permitting and small business support and will be held every 2–3 weeks.
Your Challenge
Create AI-powered agents and workflows that gather, clean, and organize program data from city and non-city sources to make it easier for youth to discover activities that match their interests, schedules, and needs.
Collaborate with fellow hackers to develop:
Catalog Builders that transform unstructured youth program data into searchable formats
Curators that pull in non-city content and data
Sync Agents that keep information fresh and accurate
Spark Finders that match youth with the right opportunities
Agenda
11:00 AM – Introduction, overview of how to use bolt.new, and hackathon team formation
12:00 PM – Hacking time (and lunch)!
3:00 PM – Presentations and judging
4:00 PM – Winners announced
All participants are expected to attend for the entire event on Thursday, September 11, 11am-4pm.
Prizes
First Place:
A $25 Visa gift card for each team member
Prizes sponsored by the Technology Alliance,
A featured write up in the City of Seattle’s City Innovation Hub
Second Place:
Recognition and prizes sponsored by the Technology Alliance
Third Place:
Recognition and prizes sponsored by the Technology Alliance
All hackathon participants will receive a free month of Bolt Pro ($25 value) to help build and deploy your own app to support Seattle’s next generation of youth! No previous coding experience is required to use Bolt's AI coding assistant, and we'll provide a short training so you can start hacking.
Important Hackathon Prep
Review this document on the background and key challenges for the hackathon.
Sign up for Bolt using this referral link to get additional credits and receive your promo code for a month of Bolt Pro at the hackathon.
Registration
To participate, you can register if you are by yourself, as part of a team looking for additional members, or as part of a complete team. Every member of a team must register separately. Full teams should consist of 2-5 people. Individuals or partial teams looking for more members will be placed into a team of no more that 5 people on the day of the event.
Sponsors
AI2 Incubator supports early-stage AI startups by providing mentorship, funding, technical resources, and community to help them rapidly develop and scale their ideas.
We Build With AI is a community of AI experts that empower people to rapidly prototype and launch projects using AI through hands-on workshops, hackathons, and collaborative events.
Bolt is an AI-powered code editor that lets you instantly prototype, build, and deploy full-stack web apps in your browser with minimal setup.
Technology Alliance is a statewide, non-profit organization of leaders from Washington’s technology-based businesses and research institutions united by the vision of a vibrant innovation economy that benefits all of Washington's citizens.
Seattle Pizza & Bar, a local business just a couple of blocks north of AI House, is supporting hackers with the classic fuel of pizza and soda.