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Hacktoberfest Hack Day Silver Spring x AI Collective

Hacktoberfest 2026

Saturday October 17, 2026
9:30AM to 3:00PM EDT
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Creative Colony Spaces 
8720 Georgia Ave Ste 302, Silver Spring, MD 20910
302
Silver spring , Md 20901
United States
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Event Description

Hack for Humanity × Hacktoberfest 2026 — Silver Spring

Join AI Collective Maryland for a one-day hackathon where you'll build open-source AI tools for social good. Bring an idea or join a team on the spot, build with open-weight models and open-source AI tooling, and demo what you made by the end of the day.

📍 Silver Spring, MD

Who it's for: Developers, designers, students, and anyone curious about building with AI. All skill levels welcome — you'll find teammates and help in the room.

Not sure what to build? Write your first open-source skills.md, build an open-source agent, fine-tune an open-weight model, or pick a problem in your community and point AI at it.

The rules:
- Build with an open-weight model or open-source AI tooling
- Ship your project to a public GitHub repo
- Solve a real problem for real people

What to bring: A charged laptop with your dev environment set up and API keys ready, so you can start building right away.

Lunch, Hacktoberfest t-shirts, stickers, and prizes provided.

Hosted by the AI Collective Maryland chapter, co-hosted by Studio Rehoboth, as part of Hacktoberfest 2026 powered by MLH, DEV, and DigitalOcean.

Who can attend?

Locations have different requirements for who can attend. This location is open to the following:

Links & Resources

Gemma 4 Resources

General hub and documentation overview.

Open link →
Gemma Quickstart

Getting started guide and rapid API setup.

Open link →
Gemma API Docs

Endpoint specifications and API references.

Open link →
Gemma Beginner Guide

Step-by-step introduction for new developers.

Open link →

Hosted by

Meheret Egzerab
Gunupudi Chaitanya
From

The AI Collective is a global non-profit community of founders, builders, researchers, and operators exploring the frontier of AI. The Maryland chapter runs free, in-person events across the DC–Baltimore corridor that bring local technologists together to learn and build. This Hack Day is co-hosted with Studio Rehoboth, a Maryland-based digital product studio.

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