A special kind of collaboration emerges when small communities work together. The Chones community captured this during a recent hackathon in July 2026, which comprised several members working across two key topic spaces.
Teams worked on a private, censorship-resistant, and governable community-organizing platform called Pacto, built by community member daopunk. The hackathon also served as a secondary outcome: sharing AI workflows members are using. This ended up surfacing solutions for the former objective, serving as a feedback loop for the whole group.
Participants approached the hackathon with playful curiosity. They adopted an adventure-style mindset that allowed exploration beyond the loose goals set by organizers. Even though the hackathon was only a week long, the ongoing discussions and side quests that emerged carried more weight than any single outcome they each initially imagined.
Some of the learnings gathered from daily notes:
1. Even if a product’s aim is privacy, usability remains top of mind for the average user, not privacy.
2. Discoverability for groups to join: if you can’t quickly find a group to learn with, the purpose is illegible.
3. Users need something they can connect with. Make people feel something, and they come back for more (doesn’t have to include gamification features).
4. Building personal AI workflows is great but keeps you in your own bubble. Learning with others lets you absorb ideas you can remix.
5. Live streaming can pair interactions with subscriptions for immediate feedback loops between chat and streamer.
From an outsider’s perspective, a hackathon might be viewed as an activity only available (or enjoyable) to tech nerds, but in reality, looking at the notes from each day the teams met online, what was actually gathered was a ton of co-learning.
You might even imagine a typical hackathon as a massive gathering of people in a single physical building. Tons of pizza boxes, catering, laptops, and coffee everywhere. But no, just as much value can be gained from meeting new, connected people who offer insight and feedback just when you need it most!
Chones proves that a hackathon doesn’t necessarily need incentives for real results to emerge. A sense of care for one another is what matters in the end. Great people sharing openly. It seems that is the kind of environment that many are seeking these days.
If you’re looking to make friends and build interesting things together, the one question you should be asking yourself is, “Why not organize a hackathon?
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