Source: Weber State AI Hackathon 2026 announcements (Forge Utah Slack)

Summary

Four messages posted to the Forge Utah Slack between February and March 2026 by Tristan Rhodes, an AI Integration and Automation Engineer at Weber State University, promoting the 2026 Weber State AI Hackathon: a full invitation with format and pricing, a registration-deadline reminder, a separate call to employers about the job fair, and a request for a speaker.

These are the only located record of that edition. By the time the event's own website was captured it had already been rewritten for the following year, erasing every prior detail — the dates, the price, the prize pool, the venue, and the two-week remote structure survive here and nowhere else.

Useful Claims

• The 2026 hackathon ran in two phases: a remote build from March 21 to April 3, 2026 with mentorship and tools provided, then an in-person finale on Saturday, April 4, 2026.
• The finale was held at Shepherd Union, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah.
• The ticket cost $10, and included breakfast, lunch, snacks, and a t-shirt.
• The prize pool was $1,800, split across Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced categories. Prizes were deliberately weighted toward the upper categories partway through, to draw experienced builders.
• Registration closed March 18, 2026, about two weeks before the finale.
• A tech job fair ran alongside the finale, free for employers.
• The event was open to anyone over 18 — students, professionals, and hobbyists alike — and advertised as requiring no experience, with free AI tools and mentors provided for the two-week build.
• The organizer solicited a speaker on marketing and monetizing apps for the April 4 finale, so at least part of the program was assembled by open call.

Verbatim

Each quote carries its speaker, channel, workspace, and date, because Slack message history is not durable and the quote has to stand on its own once the original is gone. Slack link markup is reduced to plain text and emoji shortcodes are dropped; nothing else is altered.

I want to personally invite this group to register for our next Weber State AI Hackathon. — Tristan Rhodes, #localevents (Forge Utah Slack), 2026-02-26

$1,800 Prize Pool: Compete for cash prizes across Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced categories. — Tristan Rhodes, #localevents (Forge Utah Slack), 2026-02-26

Build (Remote): March 21 – April 3, 2026 (Receive mentorship & tools) — Tristan Rhodes, #localevents (Forge Utah Slack), 2026-02-26

Location: Shepherd Union, Weber State University (Ogden, UT) — Tristan Rhodes, #localevents (Forge Utah Slack), 2026-02-26

Who Can Join? Open to everyone over 18, including students, professionals, and AI enthusiasts. — Tristan Rhodes, #localevents (Forge Utah Slack), 2026-02-26

Cost: Only $10 — Tristan Rhodes, #localevents (Forge Utah Slack), 2026-02-26

Final reminder to register for the Weber State AI Hackathon before the deadline on March 18th! — Tristan Rhodes, #localevents (Forge Utah Slack), 2026-03-16

We provide free AI tools and mentors for two weeks, to help them build their very first project. — Tristan Rhodes, #localevents (Forge Utah Slack), 2026-03-16

We have added a lot of prizes to the intermediate and advanced levels to encourage experienced builders to participate. — Tristan Rhodes, #localevents (Forge Utah Slack), 2026-03-16

We are hosting a Job Fair during the Weber State AI Hackathon, which is FREE for employers. — Tristan Rhodes, #jobs (Forge Utah Slack), 2026-03-07

This will be on April 4th in Ogden, Utah for the Weber State AI Hackathon. — Tristan Rhodes, #general (Forge Utah Slack), 2026-03-24

Reliability Notes

The Forge Utah Slack is an open community workspace and these were posted to public announcement channels explicitly asking readers to forward them, so they are public in every sense that matters for citation.

testimony rather than official-page because of durability: the permalinks resolve only for signed-in members, nothing can fetch them signed out, the Internet Archive cannot crawl past the login, and Slack retention will eventually delete them. Hence no **Retrieved:** and no **Archive:**.

These are the organizer's own promotional posts, which means they establish what was advertised and scheduled — never what happened. Nothing here shows how many registered, how many finished, what was built, or whether the $1,800 was awarded. The one message posted after the finale date is a speaker request from before it, not a report.

This is the second worked example in this corpus of the pattern where the ephemeral channel is more accurate than the public page: hackathon.weber.edu is a live, official, first-party URL that today tells a reader the event is in March 2027 and says essentially nothing else. A reader who trusted only the durable source would conclude the 2026 edition never existed. The captured Slack messages are the more complete record precisely because the website overwrote itself.

One internal caution: the prize-weighting claim comes from the March reminder describing a change made after the February invitation, so the $1,800 total and its split across categories are stated at different times and may not describe the same final structure.

Related Pages

• Weber State AI Hackathon
• Source: Weber State AI Hackathon official website
• Forge Utah