Wellington | Claude Impact Lab

Wellington Impact Lab — a one-day civic AI hackathon

Keeping Wellington informed in an emergency.

New Zealand's first Impact Lab starts with a real city problem. On Saturday 8 August, Wellington's builder community works alongside Wellington City Council emergency-management experts to turn public information into tools people could genuinely use — before and during an emergency.

WCC's emergency management team has had ten activations in the past two years. The problems you'll work on aren't hypothetical — they come straight from those operations, and the people who own them will be in the room.

The challenge

Emergency decisions are only as good as the information flow behind them. Five real WCC problems, narrowed to the strongest tracks on the day:

Bring official warnings and local conditions into one community view

Create a two-way information channel between communities and Council

Identify and verify emerging local impacts from public information

Help emergency staff sort and prioritise incoming information

Detect unusual changes in movement around the city

How it works

Small teams, real support. Every team gets a problem brief, pre-built public datasets and Claude skills ready to go, a WCC domain expert, and mentors to unblock data, Claude, and delivery questions.

Public data only. You'll build against what's actually available — official warnings, hazard layers, river and rainfall gauges, road and transport feeds — real-world messiness included.

Build with Claude. Claude Code access provided on the day. No prior AI experience required — bring your craft, whatever it is. Added bonus if you have a Claude Max plan.

Ship by 4 PM. Submissions are a GitHub repo and a 2-minute demo video. Live demos and judging follow, with awards at 5:30.

Who should apply

Developers, designers, data folk, product thinkers, and anyone from Wellington's civic and emergency-management community who wants to build something useful on a bad day. Places are limited and teams are kept small — apply early.

Run of day

8:00 Doors, breakfast, team formation

9:00 Problem briefing + datasets

9:30 Build begins

12:30 Lunch + lightning talks

4:00 Submissions close

5:00 Live demos + judging

5:30 Awards

6:00 Close

Judging

Usefulness beats polish. Prototypes are scored on usefulness to WCC, working with the supplied data, a working demo, honesty about limits, and a credible path to real use. The best outcome isn't a perfect prototype — it's a credible next step for Wellington.

Venue: Wellington City Council

Hosted by Chris Watson & Adam Holt, Claude Community Ambassadors

Organisers: Creative HQ & ZunoSmart Labs

Food & Drink: Catering provided. This is an alcohol-free event.