Green Circles Manchester | AI Hackathon | Supported by Barclays

Ten teams, one per Greater Manchester borough, spend a day building a prototype against a real local-government challenge handed over on the morning by someone who works on it. Each team pairs a borough council representative with a tech mentor, a business mentor and three mentees, and every team pitches to a panel of VCs, council leaders and ecosystem figures. The challenges are the unglamorous kind: services swamped by repetitive enquiries, adults wanting to retrain with nowhere to start, employers unable to find local talent. Solutions should be tech or AI-enabled but need not be purely technical. Supported by Barclays Eagle Labs and Silicon Mingle; 09:00 to 17:00 at the Renold Building. Note what this ticket is: the mentee place, 60 across ten teams. Mentors, council representatives and judges register separately. Why go: a rare hackathon where the problem owner sits with the team all day and the prototype has a plausible route into use. Best for early-career builders who want public-sector problems and senior mentors more than a prize.