​From Spreadsheet Chaos to One Source of Truth: An Event Ops AI Hackathon with Softr

​Overview

​Your vendor list lives in one spreadsheet. Sponsor status in another. Budget in a third. Onboarding in a doc nobody's opened since kickoff. And the real picture — what's actually happening right now — lives in your inbox, or in someone's head.

​That's not one data problem. That's a hundred small ones, scattered across every tool your team touches. Which is why a vendor contract slips through, or a sponsor deliverable gets missed, or "what's the latest on X" turns into a five-minute hunt.

​This hackathon exists to fix that. Not by handing you another tool to add to the pile — by pulling everything you've already got into one place, and turning it into a single app your whole team can actually trust.

​We're not building the next Cvent, Bizzabo, or Accelevents. Those own the attendee-facing experience. We're building what runs underneath it: the internal systems your team opens every day to track vendors, manage sponsors, watch budget, onboard staff, and know what's going on without asking three people first.

​Bring what you've already got — a spreadsheet, a CRM, a form, anything currently tracking part of your operation. By the end of the session, it's a real, permissioned app your team can start using.

​Who it's for

​This is for the people who feel the chaos firsthand — whose day runs across too many disconnected tools, and who are done chasing status updates:

• ​Event Operations Managers and Event Producers/Coordinators, who own the vendor lists, run-of-show docs, and staff onboarding currently scattered across spreadsheets

• ​Event and Sponsorship Managers, who need one shareable view of sponsor status, deliverables, and fulfillment instead of chasing it over email

• ​Venue, Logistics, and Vendor Managers, who need real-time visibility into contracts, deliveries, and approvals without living in their inbox

​If your honest answer to "where's the latest status on X" is "let me check three different files," this is your hackathon.

​Experience

• ​12:00 – 12:50 — Doors open, check-in, and light lunch

• ​12:50 — Welcome

• ​13:00 — AI literacy workshop with Lucy Postlethwaite: assess where you stand on AI literacy, understand the difference between using an AI workflow and using an Agent, and map out your next steps in AI transformation

• ​14:00 — Hackathon starts: naming the chaos — why event data ends up scattered across every tool — then team formation and guided building with Softr

• ​17:00 — Project presentations

• ​18:00 — Winners and wrap-up

​Host

​Francisco Opazo — Growth & Community EMEA at Softr.io, Founder, Led by Community

​Francisco Opazo is a community strategist and marketing leader with over 14 years of experience helping fast-growing startups grow through community-led strategies, demand generation, and strategic partnerships. Over the past three years, he has run end-to-end flagship conferences for community professionals as conference producer and organiser, owning every part of the operation — from venue, vendor, and sponsorship management to programming and on-the-day delivery.

​He is the Founder of Led by Community C.I.C., a UK-registered Community Interest Company that supports community professionals around the world through education, peer connection, and career development, with a thriving private network, cohort-based courses, and a year-round event series.

​As part of that ecosystem, Francisco owns Community Week, a series of global conferences for community builders — including London Community Week, Toronto Community Week, and Lisbon Community Week — bringing together thousands of professionals each year to share ideas, strengthen their practice, and shape the future of community building.

​His career includes leadership roles at high-growth platforms such as Circle.so and Bettermode, where he was one of the first marketers building marketing operations end to end, from zero to one.

​Workshop Facilitator

​Lucy Postlethwaite — Founder, Practical AI

​Lucy Postlethwaite is the founder of Practical AI, a GenAI training and consultancy for creative event professionals and experiential agencies. With 14 years inside the industry across ops, client services, creative pitches and delivery, she works with agency teams who are time-poor, client-pressured, and just want to use AI in the work they're already doing, without it becoming another thing to manage.

​She's delivered events for Anthropic, Salesforce, Amazon, Microsoft and Dell, led an AI activation for senior CMOs at Salesforce Dreamforce, and worked alongside Anthropic at their CEO Forum. She's a judge for the Event Technology Awards AI Edition 2026, has spoken at Event Tech World and Event Tech Live, and runs regular online AI bootcamps and cohorts for her event freelancer community.

​Her approach: AI sits inside the work, not on top of it.

​About Softr.io

​Softr is the AI app builder for creating real business software without code. Describe what you need, or drag and drop it yourself, and Softr handles the interface, the database, and the workflows — while you keep control of the parts that matter most: roles, permissions, and security.

​Softr connects to the data you already have — spreadsheets, Airtable, Notion, HubSpot, SQL databases, and more — and turns it into custom portals, dashboards, internal tools, and CRMs, built and shipped the same day. Loved by over a million teams worldwide, from fast-growing startups to organizations like the NBA, Google, and Celonis.

​About the venue: SpaceMade & Studio Y

​Studio Y is built for the way modern businesses work today — flexible, collaborative and evolving.

​We've designed a space that balances focus and connection, bringing together people across industries who are serious about what they do. It's not about being everything to everyone, but about creating the right environment for people doing meaningful work.

​More than just a coworking space, Studio Y brings together private studios, flexible offices, meeting rooms and shared workspace under one roof — all within a thoughtfully designed setting and a supportive professional community.