Participant Criteria

The hackathon is free and open to the public: teams should form on Devpost prior to November 13.

Dates

November 13-14, 2026

Timeline and Agenda

Note: Registration, team formation and challenge briefs will run here on Devpost, opening about three weeks before the event. Teams can explore the graph and scope their projects in advance, then come together on Saturday to finish, present and compete. System staff and mentors will be on hand throughout for technical and domain support.

Prizes

System is funding $7,500 in cash prizes: $2,000 for the winner of each category, and $500 for an honorable mention in each. Judges will be domain experts who can think across disciplines. Participants keep their IP and may release code under any open license; work that contains or derives from the graph inherits its CC BY-NC license, and System may showcase entries.

Judging Criteria and Winner Selection

Stay tuned!

Hackathon Official Rules

Projects & Code

• Fresh code only. All code must be written during the event. Preexisting projects or previously written code may not be submitted.
• Planning is allowed. Ideas, sketches, wireframes, and research done beforehand are fine. Writing implementation code beforehand is not.
• Libraries & APIs. Publicly available third-party APIs, SDKs, open-source libraries, frameworks, and boilerplate starter templates may be used. Projects must respect each tool’s license and terms of service.
• Attribution. Any third-party code, assets, or templates must be credited in your README.
• Original work. Projects must be your team’s own work. Copying another team’s or another person’s project is plagiarism.
• IP ownership. Participants keep 100% ownership of the intellectual property they create during the hackathon.

Teams

• Size. Teams have 2 to 7 members.
• Projects. Each participant may belong to only one team and contribute to only one project.
• Rosters. Team rosters must be finalized before the submission deadline. Anyone not listed on the submission is not eligible for prizes.
• Outside help. Only registered team members may write code for the project. Mentors may give advice but may not build it for you.

Timeline & Submission

• Hard deadline. Projects must be submitted before the official countdown ends. Late submissions will not be reviewed.
• Required deliverables:
  • A link to a working prototype
  • A video demo of 2–3 minutes
  • A link to a public code repository (e.g., GitHub)
• No changes after the deadline. Commits pushed to the repository after the deadline may result in disqualification.
• Commit history. Your repository’s commit history should show that work was done during the event.

Conduct & Judging

• Code of conduct. Harassment, plagiarism, and cheating will result in immediate disqualification.
• Be respectful. Treat all participants, mentors, judges, and organizers with respect, both in person and online.
• Judging. Projects are judged on criteria shared by the organizers before or at the start of the event.
• Final decisions. The judging panel’s decisions are final and cannot be contested.
• Organizer rights. Organizers may disqualify any submission that breaks these rules, and may update the rules if needed with notice to all participants.