About


Code for the Kingdom is a weekend hackathon for techies, designers, and entrepreneurial starters. Using prayer and technology, we tackle from a Christian perspective the challenges confronting our society, our churches, and our spiritual lives. Technology alone is insufficient. Yet God can use it as a tool for good. The weekend of June 28-30, 2013 more than 100 technologists will converge in San Francisco to use technology to help Kingdom-minded initiatives flourish.

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Event Theme

Spiritual Formation

Create technology to help believers transform their characters to be more like Christ, and their actions to conform to God’s will. Which new technologies would impact discipleship through prayer, study, worship, church and community involvement, children’s programs, service, and other transformational approaches?.

Stronger & Healthier Ministries

As ministries flourish, communities thrive and the whole land prospers. Let’s create technologies to increase the impact and reach of ministries, help create a culture of generosity, and equip leaders for the work of ministry.

HELP CREATE A CULTURE OF GENEROSITY

The Church and non-profits are always significantly underfunded. The Great Commission could be tremendously impacted and enhanced if financial resources were available. What better opportunity than this to cultivate generosity with Generis? Build fresh user experiences that can help organizations redefine the giving experience for their patrons. Leverage the power of technology to encourage individuals and families to become generous to the causes and churches.

SOCIAL JUSTICE

How can technology alleviate the social maladies that oppress so many? How can you help knock off a little corner of darkness?

Register now to join us as we work to leveraging technology to transforms lives. Plus, you get to rub shoulders with some of the most effective global ministries, technologists, entrepreneurs, investors, hi-tech accelerators, church leaders and creative individuals from every discipline.

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WINNERS

Here are the winners.

Best Overall

Likewise

A peer mentorship system for spiritual life.

http://likewiseapp.co

Team Members: Roberto Ortiz, Jerry Shen, Andrew Pottenger, Bryan Lin, Andrew Wu , Billy Nguyen

Best of New Code

I'll Join You

An online meeting space for Christians. The app supports stronger, healthier churches and offers a space for leaders to find out what people in their community might ordinarily feel too shy to mention.

Team Members: Shamichael Hallman, Johnathan Pulos, Justin Lam

Best of Social Justice

Free as Me

An app that helps people send tips to police about human trafficking inspired by the work of the International Justice Mission to inform and support police raids around the world. The app would use GPS data, photos, and audio recording to send reports directly to people who could respond.

Team Members: Steven Hepting, Renata Phillippi, Jonathan Ritchey, Mengying Niu, Hosanna fuller, Naresh Kumar, Safris Suresh

Best of Spiritual Formation

Abide

An app to "share the gift of prayer," that reminds people to prayer and creates a "prayer mode" for your phone so you don't get interrupted by notifications while focusing on spiritual activity.

https://abide.is/

Team Members: Eric Tse, Bethany Fong, Ian Hsu, Neil Ahlsten, Brian Sun, Ryan Cui, Aaron Hipple, Andrew Chung, Leslie Pound, Sum Wong, Dash Laryea

Best of Stronger and Healthier Ministries

+Bible

A social reader for the Bible. Using this app, you can share notes on religious texts with your friends.

http://www.plusbible.com/

Team Members: Chris Chiu, Chris Lee, Zach Johnston, Babatunde Olutade


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Schedule

Friday June 28th, 2013
6:00 PMDoors Open
6:00 PM - 7:00 PMDinner & Networking
7:00 PM - 7:25 PMWelcome & Review Format
7:25 PM - 7:35 PMAPI Presentations by Logos, Kii, Fellowship1, Tango
7:35 PM - 7:50 PMReview - Official Challenges
7:50 PM - 8:20 PMOpen Floor - pitch your own project
8:20 PM - 11:59 PMTeam Formation/Hack Away

This venue will remain open around the clock. Participants are encouraged to utilize the facility and take advantage of the meals and healthy hacker activities day and night, if desired.

Saturday June 29th, 2013
12:00 AM - 11:59 PMHacking
8:30 AMBreakfast
12:00 PMLunch
6:00 PMDinner
9:00 AM - 5:00 PMMeet the Mentors

Meet with Mentors is a great opportunity to connect with industry experts who can guide you and your concepts. The organizers will help you connect with mentors of your choice on Friday/Saturday.

This venue will remain open around the clock. Participants are encouraged to utilize the facility and take advantage of the meals and healthy hacker activities day and night, if desired.

Sunday June 30th, 2013
8:30 AMBreakfast
11:00 AM - 11:20 AMSunday Service
12:00 PMLunch
1:00 PMPresentation Walk-thru & Judges Make Rounds
2:30 PMTeam Presentations Begin (5 min max presentation, 3 min max Q&A)
4:30 PM Judges adjourn
4:50 PMCall-back
5:00 PMAwards Ceremony
5:30 PMClosing

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Challenges

Here are the challenges. In case you are already interested or working on a project, don’t change course. But please keep in mind that your project must be aligned with the themes of the Hackathon. Please come prepared to pitch your project at the Hackathon so that you can recruit teams to work on them.

Children

How can technology bring the word of God to the mobile first generation of children?

Did you know that more than 80% of Christians choose Christ between the ages of 4-14? Children are the biggest mission field, and they have impressionable young minds that are fertile ground for the Word of God.

Build a mobile application to help children learn the word of God, bury it in their hearts and share it with their friends in a fun, interactive, and engaging way, using the platforms they're already using while making the Bible more "awesome" and "cool" than Angry Birds, Temple Run, and Candy Crush.

Champions

Leadership Network

Engaging and releasing the best of an individual

How do we leverage technology within our local church and/or network of churches to release and accelerate great ideas from every member of the congregation?

In too many churches the 80-20 rule is at work, where 80% of the congregation is only minimally engaged. In today’s world, most every person in a congregation has an educational or training specialty that could uniquely contribute to the life of their church. According to surveys, about 40% of a church’ membership cites the perception that their skills and ideas being undervalued by the church as the main limiting factor to their engagement.

But what if the church truly developed a mechanism by which every individual could act upon his/her God given call?

Imagine a Kingdom Crowd Innovation Platform, one that brings together the components of Open Innovation, Collective Knowledge, Collective Creativity, Community Building, Social Engagement, and Crowd Funding.

Imagine it as a local church platform by which any and every member of the congregation can pitch ideas to positively affect the church, the community, society, and the Kingdom.

Imagine other members evaluating those ideas, giving them thumbs or down, and supporting them with time, talent, or treasure.

Imagine allowing the larger community to engage with the local church in such way, giving the un-churched Kingdom purpose resulting in passion for Kingdom initiatives.

Champions

Leadership Network

Generosity

Simpler and quicker to give with automated responses to givers

Knowing that generosity brings about spiritual growth and that generosity is a like a muscle (the sooner they start exercising it the stronger the person will become), how do we radically shrink the amount of time it takes someone to become generous to a cause?

Giving and generosity systems in churches are set up mainly to appeal to the Boomer generation and older. As giving motivations changes, younger givers are not only looking at different reasons to give but also different methods to give. Churches are notorious for only promoting cash and checks in their weekly offerings. This will not work as we try to encourage church people (especially the younger generations) to become more generous to the church.

How do we make it very simple for people to give electronically? How can we develop easy to use giving mechanisms (mobile devices) that would be appealing and easy to use? And, after they give, how can we created automated responses based on their giving activity (amount of gift, frequency of gift, etc.). An additional feature would be automatically generated reports for the senior leadership team showing changes in giving activity – increase in regular giving, significant one-time gift, decrease in giving.

Additionally, givers are motived when they know their giving makes a difference. In other words, “How are lives changed when I give?” Stories of impact make a big difference. However, churches are challenged when it come to collecting the stories and telling them to their constituency. What if we could create a “generosity channel” in the church – a place where people would be encouraged to upload their stories. The church would need to have a curator to screen and organize the videos. People could subscribe to the channel. Alternately, the church could push the videos to people as they make contributions to the church.

Benefit: Simple, economical online tools allow leaders to do what they do best, without worrying about the technical details of raising money. Providing a simple interface to encourage givers to start giving will advance generosity, especially with people who do not typically write checks to the church. Integrations with various church management systems will allow leaders to keep close contact with the givers. and start raising money.

Champions

Generis

Crowdfunding

Crowd funding and synergy with other churches

Communities have needs that are not funded. Churches do not typically come together to fund community needs. Many times, those churches would fund community type projects if they had the resources. The idea here is to unite multiple churches in a community and, at the same time, create a crowd funding mechanism to raise the resources. For example, an urban ministry has a legitimate need for $100,000. Churches do not pay attention because they know they do not have $100,000. What if we could unite 4-5 churches at $20,000 - $25,000 each and then use a crowd funding mechanism inside each church to raise the $100,000 total?

(Note: Though we have only mentioned community needs, this mechanism could be used to fund all kinds of needs – church plants and startup ministries, for example. Can we create an application that will grow with the needs of leaders, especially when they transition from 'startup' to 'established'? Users will be able to create instant giving sites, with TANGIBLE items pre-populated that we know new churches need (i.e. trailers, microphones, stage equip, insurance, etc.). Similar to Kickstarter, but context specific to meet known needs church leaders need, the system will automatically generate a giving micro site and give leaders full control over their own giving area.)

Benefit: Simple, economical online tools allow leaders to do what they do best, without worrying about the technical details of raising money. Processing costs will be distributed across the community, so individual ministries are not bearing brunt of all those costs. Gives leaders a 'jumpstart' on casting vision for tangible needs, because the system will pre-populate their giving area with common needs. Integrations with MailChimp, Social Media, etc, will allow leaders to quickly cast vision and start raising money.

Champions

Generis

Human Trafficking

How can you bring light into the dark world of commercial sex trafficking? Can you locate the child lost and hopeless in the hands of her owner? Join us in searching for the lost child just as Jesus went after the lost coin or the lost sheep?

Create technologies that would disrupt the business of sex trafficking, bring tools to the men, women, and organizations fighting sex trafficking globally, and bring hope and safe passage to the victims.

For example:

Build a mobile application that tourists and residents can use to alert suspicious activity in the area, with GPS, photo, time of day, video, audio, and text. Include tips to teach users to successfully identify suspicious activity. Perhaps even alert users of successful rescues in the area.

Build a web front-end that can be used to dispatch agents of sex trafficking fighting organizations to the locations, based on urgency, and accuracy of the information. Track when an agent decides to accept the location, their notes, as well as any subsequent trips to the location. Visualize all interactions using maps, timelines, photo albums to tag people, etc.

Build a mobile application for agents to intercept jobs near their location and record their own notes, photos, GPS, video, time of day, audio, and text. Rank urgency of rescue, and certainty of the crime. This must have the ability to go into silent or incognito mode once inside a facility, for the safety of the agents.

Champions

International Justice Mission

Prayer

How can we activate 21st century believers to pray more often, deep and informed?

Prayer is at the center of our relationship with God. It is our means of communication with Him, it strengthens us as believers and as community, and it is how we seek for what God wants for us to do. While food, water, and air sustain life, Prayer sustains our spiritual life. As Christians we are asked to never stop praying. Yet, the busy lifestyle created by the rapid diffusion of digital technologies like mobile phones, social networking sites, and the Internet is resulting in an ever busy lifestyle that significantly distracts us away from Prayer. But what if we could use the very same technologies to encourage a Prayer?

Build technologies that activate and grow the praying community relevant to me for my requests, praises and encouragement by providing a means to:

Mobilize prayer for my ministry,

Discover and respond to how God is moving in my praying community, my city and across the globe

notify affirmation, love, encouragement from a user’s praying community

Champions

Leadership Network

Absent Fathers

How can technology help alleviate and/or combat the effects of fatherlessness in a child’s life, in turn strengthening families, reducing poverty and crime?

Fatherlessness is epidemic, affecting one out of every 4 children in the United States. According to the US Census and other data, fatherless children represent: 75% of adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers, 85% of youths in prisons, 63% of youth suicides, 90% of all homeless and runaway children, 85% of all children who show behavior disorders, 71% of all high school dropouts. Fatherless children are four times more likely to be poor, and at least twice as like to be involved in criminal activity.

What if technology could foster ways by which every fatherless family could receive love, opportunities, mentorship, support, kindness, healthy relationships, and genuine acceptance from others?

Champions

Leadership Network


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Prizes

A panel of judges will award thousands of dollars in cash prizes.

  • $3,000 to Best Overall
  • $2,000 to Best New Code
  • $2,000 to Best of Social Justice
  • $2,000 to Best of Spiritual Formation
  • $2,000 to Best of Stronger & Healthier Ministries

After the hackathon, your solutions will be featured in a Leadership Network Advance edition reaching over 50,000 church leaders worldwide.

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Mentors

Meet with Mentors is a great opportunity to connect with industry experts who can guide you and your concepts. Schedule your sessions with mentors of your choice on Friday/Saturday and get connected.

Alain Ayoub

Alain Ayoub
Engineering Manager, Google

Alain is a software engineering manager at Google responsible for bringing fast Internet access to everyone in the world. Most recently, he helped launch Google+ and built software to connect Google's data centers. Prior to Google, Alain held engineering positions at Symantec, Pillar Data Systems, and Maxtor. He has a passion for advising innovative Jesus-centered tech start-ups and brings over a decade of experience in the tech industry.
Blake Burris

Blake Burris
CEO, CleanWeb Initiative

Bob Pritchett

Bob Pritchett
President/CEO Logos Bible Software

Christine Moon

Christine Moon
Head of Android Partnerships for Asia-Pacific, Google

Dave Travis

Dave Travis
CEO, Leadership Network

Jim Sheppard

Jim Sheppard
CEO, Generis

Jim Sheppard is CEO and principal of Generis. He is an avid student of generosity and is passionate about spreading it throughout the church. For over 19 years, he has devoted his life to helping church people become more generous. Jim is a frequent writer on generosity and ministry funding. His articles have been featured in NACBA Ledger, Your Church, Church Business, Church Solutions, Worship Facilities and BuildingForMinistry.com. He is co-author of the upcoming book, “Contagious Generosity.” He is also an inspirational speaker and he has spoken at national church related conferences including WFX (Worship Facilities), National Association of Church Business Administrators, Christian Leadership Alliance and Leadership Network. Jim is active in sharing his thoughts about generosity through Twitter (Jim_Sheppard) and his blog, www.jimsheppard.net. Jim and his wife Nancy have two daughters, Anna and Emily, and live in Atlanta. He is actively involved in his church where he serves as an officer and provides leadership to the Generosity Ministry Team.
Jim Straatman

Jim Straatman
Technologist, Logos Bible Software

Josh Kwan

Josh Kwan
Co-founder and Board Chair, Praxis

Josh Kwan is the Board Chair for Praxis and the Director of International Giving for the David Weekley Family Foundation, where he helps provide growth capital to a portfolio of young nonprofits tackling global poverty. In addition to financing, he provides strategic planning, financial assessment, and often serves on the Board of Directors. He graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Government, and also has an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
Ken Churchill

Ken Churchill
Senior Vice President. Morgan Stanley

Ken Churchill is Portfolio Manager Director, Senior Vice President, and Financial Advisor for Morgan Stanley. In the 1980s, Ken was the Administrator of World Vision in the central region of Sudan, and worked in Nairobi, Kenya, in public health. He worked twice in Thailand. During the first of these assignments he lived and worked in the Banvinai Refugee Camp near the Mekong River. Later he returned to run World Relief Thailand and the Christian Medical Team, both in Bangkok.
Kent Shaffer

Kent Shaffer
Founder, Open Church

Kent Shaffer lives in an RV with his wife and 2 kids. It's part of his work with Open Church - an initiative to help disciples of Jesus collaborate, learn from each other, and share resources. At the core of this collaborative ecosystem is a free, global library of digital content and tools. He also co-founded a design and marketing firm, launched and sold a few tech startups, and gave strategic counsel to groups such as LifeChurch.tv, Saddleback Church, charity: water, Leadership Network, and OneHope. He writes at ChurchRelevance.com about the intersection of theology and methodology - what we do vs what Christ said. His ministry roots began as a missionary’s kid in Peru and evolved into 10+ years of youth and children’s ministry at Church on the Move, LifeChurch.tv, and Frontline Church.
Kevin Kim

Kevin Kim
Director of Innovation/Teaching Pastor, Menlo Park Presbyterian Church

Kevin Kim is the executive director of Crazy Love Ministries and is working on a house church movement in San Francisco with Francis Chan. He received his B.A in Biology from the University of Virginia and his M.Div from Biblical Theological Seminary.
He is passionate about the intersection of worship and justice, innovation and the church.
In his free time he enjoys basketball, snowboarding and spending time with his wife and three children.
Lusi Chien

Lusi Chien
Co-founder,4Soils

Lusi Chien is a Stanford MBA and a dual degree MPA at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is the founder and CEO of 4Soils, a mobile an edu-tainment company that is connecting the mobile first generation with their faith through interactive content and engaging community.
Neil Ahlsten

Neil Ahlsten
Co-Founder, CEO, Carpenter's Code

Neil has a passion for innovation that serves the Gospel. Neil is Co-Founder/CEO of Carpenters Code, which has built Abide, an iPhone app for praying together. Neil is on leave from Google, where he spent six years managing business development for vertical ads, launching access and mobile projects in Africa, and a variety of other roles. Before Google, Neil was the Darfur / Chad refugee program manager for the U.S. Department of State, and served in hotspots across Africa for Food for the Hungry and the World Bank.
Scott Hagan

Scott Hagan
Pastor of Real Life Church in Sacramento & Church Multiplication Network

Tom Rikert

Tom Rikert
Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

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Organizers


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API

At Code For The Kingdom, we value your precious time and don’t want you to reinvent the wheel. That’s why our sponsors have come forward to offer their API, in order to enable you to build better and faster. That said, please note that there is no compulsion that these API must be used or any other restrictions on technologies that you may use at the Hackathon.

We believe that these platforms may assist you as you create effective solutions to today’s problems. So leverage these API and the best resources around so that together, we can create technology that matters.

The Fellowship One REST API.

The Fellowship One REST API

Fellowship One is a web-based church management software system that allows a church of any size, from new church plants to multi-site mega churches, to be more effective in ministry, more efficient in administration, and more engaged with their communities. Fellowship One provides a unique 360-degree, single view of the involvement and needs of the families in your church so that you can personalize their care.

The Fellowship One REST API is a REST-based web application that uses several open protocols and patterns to enable 3rd party integration with Fellowship One and provide consumers with access to secure resources. We will also award a $500 prize to the best use of the Fellowship One API.

Use the participation code CFTK13 at: http://developer.fellowshipone.com/codeforthekingdom

Biblia.com and Faithlife.com API.

Biblia.com API

http://api.biblia.com/docs/

The Biblia.com API provides access to information about available Bibles (Find, Image), access to text in those Bibles (Content), and the ability to find content within those Bibles (Search). Additional services support validating Bible references (Parse), comparing Bible references (Compare), and finding Bible references in text and HTML (Scan, Tag).

Faithlife.com API

https://developer.faithlife.com/

The Faithlife API provides Community and Accounts functionality. The Accounts API encompasses user and group data, such as a user’s role in a group or what groups a user is a member of, while the Community API encompasses all social interaction between accounts, such as messaging and commenting.

  • If you plan to use both APIs, you’ll have to register with each independently.


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Sponsors

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Rules

Why the rules?

The rules are in place to give every participant the same opportunity for success. In order to be eligible for the prizes, participants must follow the rules. However, if you want to participate and not follow the rules below, you will be permitted to do so, although you will not be eligible for the prizes.

Importantly, you can start coding ahead of the hackathon or at the hackathon. So what are you waiting for? Register now and get started!

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Read the rules

You can start coding ahead of the hackathon or at the hackathon.

USE WHAT YOU KNOW

Participants are free to use any tools that they know, in order to help them code.

CODING RULES

There will be identical but separate cash awards for teams that started coding before the hackathon as well as teams that started coding at the hackathon. However, some or all of the coding must take place at the hackathon, in order to be eligible for the prizes.

TRY TO USE OUR SPONSOR’S API’S

Although not mandatory, participants are encouraged to use our platform sponsor’s technologies.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Participants have full ownership of what they build during the Code for the Kingdom hackathon and are free to do with it as they wish. If you build as a team, the IP is shared by the team. If you build as an individual, the IP is all yours.

FINISH ON TIME

Participant must submit their project by the submission time on Sunday afternoon. No late submissions will be accepted.

TAXES

Prizes are non- transferable by the winner. Prize winners will be solely responsible for all applicable taxes related to accepting a prize.

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FAQ

What's a hackathon?

A hackathon is an event where people get together and develop some awesome technologies in a short time span. Think of it as a creative marathon where at the end you have some product to show for.


Who is organizing the 2013 Code for the Kingdom Bay Area Hackathon?

The Code for the Kingdom Bay Area Hackathon is being organized by Leadership Network with the collaboration of Carpenters, and Menlo Park Presbyterian Church.


What is this hackathon trying to accomplish?

This Hackathon is a non-profit event to encourage the activation and on-going collaboration of a larger ecosystem of all sort of creative individuals ( including programmers, designers, creatives, entrepreneurs, and leaders of churches, non-profits, and the marketplace) who are passionate about creating technologies to tackle from a Christian perspective the challenges confronting our society, our communities, our churches, and our spiritual lives.


Is there a main theme to the Code for the Kingdom Bay Area Hackathon?

Yes, Transforming Lives. How can technology help alleviate and eradicate all forms of injustice while teaching about God’s unconditional love?


I'm from outside the Bay Area. Can I still participate?

Yes. Join us.


I'm not Christian. Can I still participate?

Yes, absolutely.


What if I don’t know how to program?

Everyone has something to offer to help transform lives. If you come full of ideas there will be technologists eager to be in a team with you.


Do I have to bring my own laptop?

Yes; we do not provide computers. Please bring anything you’ll need to code.


Is food provided?

Yes – We will provide dinner on Friday. breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Saturday, and breakfast, and lunch on Sunday.


I can’t stay whole 24 hours, can I still participate?

Yes. We realize that 47 hours is a long time, and that some people might have other commitments, or might prefer to work remotely, or need to go home/hotel to rest and shower. Yet, you need to be present for the initial few hours during the startup demos, and at some point you need be at the venue and do some work onsite. You will also need to be present for the final few hours for the presentations and judging.


Can I sleep at the venue?

Yes the venue will be open for the duration of the event, please bring a sleeping bag, a pillow, or whatever you might need, and find a place at the venue to take a good nap.


Are there showers at the venue?

No.


Will I meet my team members before the event?

Possibly. You can use the Code for the Kingdom Google + Community at anytime to meet other participants, propose ideas, and recruit or be recruited into a team. But you can also bring your own team, or come alone and become part of a team at the hackathon.


Can I present a technology I already have?

You can build on top of something you have, but whatever you present must have new code developed for at least one of the challenges of the hackathon and you must do some of that coding at the hackathon venue during the hackathon hours.


Do I have to work non-stop?

No. The work space will be available non-stop ( the entire hackathon 47 ) but it is up to you and your team to decide on your work schedule.


Who owns the IP of what we make?

This is ultimately a question for your team. But neither the organizers nor Code for the Kingdom claims any ownership of any technologies you develop.


Will I be able to test my presentation before the final presentation?

Yes!


What's the format of the final presentation?

Each team will have 3 minutes for their demo and 2 minutes to answer questions from the judges.


Who will be in attendance at the final presentations?

The final screening is public, although space is limited. Expect a mixture of participants, hi-tech executives, venture capitalists and angels, ministry and non-profit leaders, press, and observers.


Will there be awards given?

Yes. We will give thousands of dollars in cash awards.


What's the hashtag?

#C4TK


Who is on the Jury?

The jury’s composition will be announced closer to the date of the hackathon.


What are the judging criteria?

The judges will consider Kingdom impact, viability, innovativeness / originality, and completeness.