Radio-Canada will host its inaugural hackathon from March 24 to 26.

The french-language arm of the CBC is set to offer its free programmer challenge to developers, designers, project leaders and more. At the event hackers will use select Radio-Canada data and work with Microsoft’s cloud computing platform AZURE to develop tech solutions.

“Hackathons are well-known events in the digital media industry but it’s a new one for us at Radio-Canada, so we’re really eager to see how it progresses,” said Maxime St. Pierre, Radio-Canada’s director of digital media.

Some nice prizes will be handed out to winners including a $1,000 scholarship and Xbox One game consoles. Notable names in the community will act as judges, including Real Ventures’ Sylvain Carle, Microsoft’s Rami Sayar, Radio-Canada’s St. Pierre and its chief of design and UX, Thomas Jonkajtys.

“We want to tie innovation and collaboration between those at Radio-Canada and those in the community. By sharing knowledge we can see a lot of nice ideas coming out of this process. In the end it’s a way for Radio-Canada to contribute to the community as well,” added St. Pierre.

He said Radio-Canada has created digital products, like its mobile app and online properties, but making sure they hosted an event for the community was an important step that it hadn’t yet done.

Hackers will generally be encouraged to come up with solutions that can be used in the media industry. With Radio-Canada opening up its own data sets, it should be a fun challenge for Montreal’s tech enthusiasts.

“While we want to encourage solutions within media, it can be anywhere from specific content to chatbots to whatever else they’d like to innovate on,” said St. Pierre. “It’s a pretty open process. Everyone will still be the owner of their work after the event, but if we see potential in something, these ideas could be adapted to Radio-Canada.”

Those interested can sign up until February 17th. As with traditional hackathons, Radio-Canada’s Hackathon 2017 will allow participants from different digital domains to develop a web or mobile app over a three-day period. It will take place at 1400 René-Lévesque Boulevard East in Montreal.

Hackers must be at least 18 years old. A minimum of 44 participants will be selected, while at least five seats will be slotted for women programmers. Teams will cap at a maximum of four people.

Radio-Canada will make their selections by February 22nd.

Once the participant list has been finalized, the next significant step in the Hackathon 2017 process comes on March 14th, when participants will be invited to attend a “major preparatory workshop” involving the Azure environment, APIs and internal services.

“We want to make sure everyone’s ready. It’ll be some of the people’s first hackathon, so we’ll make sure we’re getting to know them before the event and they’ll get to know the space. There won’t be any surprises once the first day comes around.”

Radio-Canada will even provide STM metro passes for participants, said St. Pierre.

For those lucky enough to win the hackathon, Microsoft will give out their XBox One consoles and gift cards, Desjardins Caisse du Quartier-Latin of Montreal will give out a $1,000 scholarship and the STM will dole out a free metro pass for a year.

“In the end we actually might have some more prizes coming, too,” said St. Pierre. “We might not have the budget of a big tech company, but we wanted to provide a little incentive for people.”

Finally, St. Pierre added that this will ideally be the first of many hackathons to come from Radio-Canada.