CDCF + EvLab Hackathon @ BAIF: From Roadmap to Practice
The hands-on culmination of Workshop 1: Building and Scaling Catholic AI: A Collaborative Roadmap
When: Saturday, November 7th, 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., followed by closing Mass at 5:00 p.m. Full schedule to come, small details subject to change.
Where: Domus Australia Roma, Via Cernaia 14 / B, 00185 Roma - Italia. Coffee, lunch, and Mass will all take place on site.
Contact: Taylor Black — blackta@cua.edu
Workshop 1 asks the Catholic AI community to identify its most important problems, propose practical solutions, and name the people who will carry them forward. The CDCF Hackathon takes the next step: bringing builders together with parish and diocesan leaders to begin turning those commitments into working solutions.
Convened by the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation, in collaboration with Evangelization Lab and the Leonum Institute, the hackathon brings participating parishes and dioceses from the United States and around the world into the work as partners. They bring concrete needs, local knowledge, and the judgment needed to determine whether a proposed solution would actually serve their communities. Developers, designers, strategists, and Church leaders work alongside them to build, test, and learn.
Drawing on the priorities and initiatives emerging from Workshop 1, teams will:
Start with a real need. Define a specific parish or diocesan problem with the people who experience it, including what success would look like in their setting.
Build on what exists. Use available tools, shared resources, and existing projects to develop a prototype, dataset, or practical workflow that addresses the need.
Test for usefulness and trust. Review the work with Church partners, examining its reliability, pastoral fit, and what would be required for responsible adoption.
Prepare the next step. Identify a project lead, a prospective pilot partner, and a concrete milestone for the first 30 days after Rome.
The day is also a hands-on learning experience for participating Church institutions. Parish and diocesan teams will practice how to identify useful applications, evaluate proposed tools, and work effectively with technical collaborators—building capabilities they can bring home.
Each team’s goal is to leave with something demonstrable, documented learning that others can reuse, and a clear path toward a pilot. Reusable code, implementation guides, and lessons will feed into the Catholic Digital Commons and its continuing community of practice, helping other communities build on the work.
BAIF convenes the conversation; named initiative leads carry the work forward. The hackathon provides a place to begin that work together, with CDCF supporting shared technical resources and continued collaboration toward results participants can report at BAIF 2027.