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On the 27th of January 70+ developers, designers, UX, project leads joined forces in nine teams to attend the European Commission hackathon called Play to impact at The One building in the heart of the European Commission's executive arm in Brussels.

Article by Marcus Johansson.

Day 1: Challenge setting and ideation

The two tasks for the teams were clear - build something that helps the content editor using AI or build something that helps reimagine how websites are created in Canvas.

While the tasks were mainly around the development of new features and modules, other actual criteria were scored, including a final powerpoint presentation in front of everyone. This meant that a multidisciplinary team was needed to have the chance to win.

One of the other criterias was that you had to use Mistral AI for your solution. Mistral, being the powerhouse of European AI innovation in large language models, was sponsors of the event. Mistral is one of the key companies to digital sovereign AI solutions in Europe.

They were both helping to make sure that all the teams had enough credits to develop and show off their impressive solutions using likewise impressive models, but also being able to support on site and helping in jury duty when selecting the winners.

amazee.ai and DrupalForge/Devpanel was also sponsoring the event, making sure that the provider setup was smooth for the teams and that the teams were given platforms where they could deploy their solutions for the jury to test.

The teams full at work

The event was the second time the commission had a hackathon specifically around Drupal and AI and this time it was a two day event, meaning people had much more time to prepare, plan, code and present the solutions.

This time there were also prep events where you could ask actual stakeholders, like editors of platforms, what their main problems they were facing.

As one of the core maintainers of the AI module, seeing the amount of people using something you helped create, was a feeling of pride, joy and satisfaction. And as someone that was on site to help technically for the second year around, two things stood out to me:

1. At the first event I had to provide a lot of assistance, the event helped us identify areas for improvement at code level. If that year was a stress test, this year was smooth sailing. The modules are robust and people are more familiar with them.
2. The usage of actual working AI code generation meant that the demos looked nicer, worked better and made sure that you can generate incredibly more impressive proof of concepts.

Group photo of most of the participants and organizers. Photo credit: Antonio De Marco.

Day 2: Sprinting to be presentation ready

On the second day all the teams had to stop at the deadline of 14:40 and have their presentation ready, code committed and Drupal instances set up.

After that started the presentation round, where each of the teams had exactly five minutes to present their solutions to the jury and answer questions from the jury. The jury consisted of people from the European Commission, one person representing Mistral, Tim Lehnen from the Drupal Association and Jamie Abrahams from the AI Initiative.

Bram ten Hove and Ronald te Brake presenting their ACE! Solution.

And the winners are ...

The winners in the end was team #4 aptly named Token Burners, that ended up making a solution that did not just spawn one actual contributed module, but two! They also had an very impressive presentation.

We now have the FlowDrop Agents that puts the AI Agents we have had in Drupal into the awesome Workflow management system FlowDrop and also the FlowDrop Node Sessions, which makes sure to support workflows to be initialized via a Drupal entity.

The winning team Token Burners and the hackathon jury.

From my point of view the hackathon was a huge success - the energy in the room, the collaboration, the brainstorming was just impressive.

A huge thanks to the organizers Sabina La Felice, Monika Vladimirova, Raquel Fialho, Antonio De Marco and Rosa. Ordinana-Calabuig and the European Commission in general for such a great event!