What Ibtechar built to run a national hackathon

As strategic partner to the Ministry of Sports and Youth, Ibtechar trained the cohort, ran the three days on the floor, and built Hackathon Pal, the bilingual platform the hackathon ran on.

Ibtechar | 27 October 2026

The Ministry of Sports and Youth, represented by the Qatar Sports for All Federation, held the hackathon from 22 to 24 October 2026 in partnership with Qatar Development Bank, Qatar Science and Technology Park and Ibtechar, as the Ministry set out at its close. It ran on the Qatar Science and Technology Park campus. Ibtechar was the strategic partner, with a scope covering three things: the training that prepared the participants, delivery on the floor across the three days, and the platform the programme ran on.

Running a three-day hackathon is mostly an information problem. The same four questions arrive all day from every team. Where do we submit? When is the next deliverable due? What exactly are the judges scoring? Which expert is free now? Answered by hand, they occupy a facilitator who should be sitting with a team.

For the Innovation Hackathon in Community Sport 2026, Ibtechar built a platform to answer those questions once. Hackathon Pal was developed in house for the event, ran in Arabic and English, and drove three views from a single set of data: participants, organisers, and the venue screen, with the AI assistant built into the participant view.

Every team signed in with its own access code and saw where it stood across the four stages, what was due next with a countdown against it, and the form to submit it. Each submission link carried the team identifier already.

That detail looks minor and determined how the final day ran. Submissions arrived attached to the right team in the right format, so no one had to spend the afternoon matching files to names, and the judging panel started on time.

The AI assistant built into the platform answered questions on deadlines, forms, challenges and judging, in either language, at any hour. A hackathon produces those questions in volume and answers them identically every time, and each one put to a facilitator is a minute taken from a team that needs help with its own problem.

It answered from the programme's published rules, so every answer matched what the organisers had set. Participants had already been taught, in the AI module of the training, that a fast answer still needs a source behind it.

The Ministry dashboard showed every group and track in real time: on-track and overdue status, submission timeliness, a comparison across the three tracks, expert feedback, and a summary of the latest submissions on request.

This is the part that changes how a day is run. A team losing momentum appeared on the dashboard while there was still time to send someone over, rather than at submission when nothing can be done about it.

The public view ran on the screens in the room with no sign-in required, showing cohort progress as anonymous markers moving through the stages. No group was named and no group was ranked.

Teams could see the room moving and judge their own pace against it. A public leaderboard would have changed how they worked from the first hour, and groups were left unnamed for that reason.

Ibtechar builds platforms to run in Arabic and English from launch, so every deadline, form, and notice in the programme was equally accessible to each participant, whichever language they work in.

Attendance at the training was a condition of entry, set by the Ministry. Nine hours ran from 15 to 17 October at Qatar Science and Technology Park, in Arabic, where most participants completed all three modules.

By the time the hackathon opened on 22 October, each team had worked through a practice challenge using prototyping methods and delivered a pitch to the room.

Facilitators from Ibtechar and MSY volunteers worked alongside the teams through both build days. Each team also had three expert sessions, one per day. Two were ten-minute consultations with specialists of the team's own choosing, including experts from Qatar Development Bank, Qatar Scientific Club and Ibtechar. The third, on the final morning, was an individual pitch rehearsal with one of the experts.

The Ministry formed the jury and published the seven weighted criteria in advance, and held four of the five jury seats, with Ibtechar holding one. Challenge fit and community impact carried the heaviest weight at 25% of the total score. Feasibility, implementation and sustainability carried 15%, which required a 90-day pilot plan from every team.

Ibtechar built the scoring interface the judges used, briefed the panel on it before the event, and ran scoring live, so results were approved and winners announced at the closing ceremony rather than days later. Three teams were honoured there, one for each track: Faza'at Al Freej in the technology track, Nabd in the workplace track, and Al Badr in the schools track.

Almost nothing in Hackathon Pal is specific to community sport. A hackathon has the same shape every time: teams, tracks, milestones, submissions, expert sessions, scoring, and a schedule that moves on the day.

What changes between programmes is the content. Track names and challenge statements, milestone deadlines, submission forms, evaluation criteria and their weights, and the languages the room works in are all configuration.

In our experience delivering national programmes, this is where the work is usually lost. Tooling gets built for an event, used for 72 hours and abandoned, and the next programme starts from a blank spreadsheet.

The platform stays in house. It is how Ibtechar delivers challenge-based programmes, so an organisation planning a hackathon, an innovation sprint or a challenge of its own engages Ibtechar for the programme, and the platform is configured for it: its tracks, its deadlines, its criteria and the languages its participants work in.

Let's work together. Talk to Ibtechar about your next challenge. Contact us

Sources: MSY closing release, 26 October 2026 and the MSY hackathon page