The capstone brief

Everything you need to know before you start building. Submissions close 21 September 2026 at 23:59 UTC.

Capstone theme

Information you can trust

Access to rights, services, and opportunities often depends on whether people can find information they understand and trust. Yet for many communities in Africa, essential information is fragmented, outdated, difficult to verify, or hidden behind systems that are hard to navigate.

For this hackathon, we're asking you to use AI software development tools to build people-centric technology that closes that gap — tools that make reliable information about civic life and opportunity visible, accessible, and actionable for communities.

Choose from three challenge tracks

  • Stability & Social Cohesion: Technology that reduces everyday friction and prevents tensions from escalating into conflict. Focus on practical use cases resolving local disputes, improving access to shared resources, strengthening coordination during crises, or enabling trusted communication between communities.
  • Transparency & Accountability: Build tools that make decisions by governments and institutions visible, understandable, and open to scrutiny. This could include helping people track public spending, understand policies, report issues, or access essential services, so institutions can be held accountable in real time, not after the fact.
  • Safety, Reporting & Protection: Design tools that allow individuals and communities to safely report threats, violence, or abuse and get timely support. Prioritize anonymity, trust, and clear pathways to action so reporting actually leads to protection.

Cross-track entries are welcome.

Project scope

Using AI software development tools, build a solution that responds to a real information-access challenge within one or more of the tracks above. This is intentionally broad to give you room to explore the needs of different African communities and develop an original approach.

Your project should do more than present information. It should help people improve how they engage with governments and public services.

This is an invention sprint, not a product launch. You are not expected to build production-ready software. You are expected to use AI software development tools to create a working proof of concept that demonstrates your idea is useful, viable, and worth developing further. Please refrain from using AI to generate your capstone idea.

Operating constraints

Your solution should account for the real conditions experienced by the communities it is designed to serve:

  • Trust and verification: Information must be accurate, traceable to credible sources, and easy to verify. Where information may change, consider how users will know when it was last updated.
  • Low bandwidth and limited access: Solutions should remain useful in areas with unreliable internet, limited mobile data, or basic devices.
  • Accessibility and inclusion: Consider people with different literacy levels, disabilities, levels of digital confidence, and access to technology.
  • Privacy and security: Users may be sharing sensitive personal, civic, health, or educational information. Your solution should protect their identity and data.
  • Multilingual access: OSF operates across diverse regions and languages, including Arabic, French, Portuguese, and numerous local languages. Language accessibility should be part of your design.
  • Local relevance: Laws, institutions, services, and eligibility requirements vary by location. Your solution should reflect local realities while allowing information to be adapted for other communities.
  • Clear next steps: Finding information is only the beginning. Strong solutions should help users understand what they can do next — where to go, who to contact, what they need, or how to make a claim or application.

What you'll submit

  1. 1A GitHub repositoryPublic, with a clear README explaining what the project does and how to run it.
  2. 2A short demo videomp4, mov, webm, or avi, up to 250MB.
  3. 3A pitch deckPDF only, up to 100MB. Cover the problem, the users, the solution, and the potential impact.
  4. 4A written summaryExplain your track, your information sources, your approach to trust and accuracy, and how you used AI tools.

How entries are judged

Judges score every entry on four equally weighted areas.

  • Uniqueness: How novel and unique the approach was to solving the problem.
  • Scalability: How well it can be scaled across geographies.
  • AI Coding Usage: How well AI coding tools were used to build the project.
  • Presentation: How well the submission is presented and aligned to the tracks.
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