Code for Nagaland

Nagaland has a rich cultural landscape spanning languages, oral traditions, folklore, customary practices, indigenous knowledge, crafts, music, food, festivals and community institutions. This track challenges teams to use technology to preserve, document, strengthen, educate and create sustainable access to this heritage.

Problem: Areas teams may explore: • Naga tribal languages and language-learning tools • Digital preservation of oral histories and folklore • Indigenous knowledge and traditional practices • Cultural archives and digital repositories • Festivals, traditional events and cultural documentation • Traditional music, art, crafts and textiles • Food and culinary heritage • Storytelling and educational platforms • Intergenerational knowledge transfer • Cultural tourism and community-led experiences • Digitisation and accessibility of historical material • Tools for communities, researchers, educators and cultural institutions

Eligibility: Conditions: • Address a real cultural or community problem, rather than merely attaching a Naga theme to a generic application. • Demonstrate sensitivity towards cultural ownership, consent and representation. • Clearly identify who contributes to and benefits from information being digitised. • Avoid treating indigenous knowledge merely as public content to be scraped and commercialised. • Consider multilingualism and accessibility where relevant. • Demonstrate a credible pathway for long-term preservation or community adoption.

Resources: Key principle: The technology itself is not the innovation. A stronger proposal may lie in the underlying archive, methodology, community participation, language dataset, preservation mechanism or novel way of transferring knowledge between generations.

Students and young people interact with a fragmented ecosystem covering education, accommodation, transport, events, clubs, peer learning, employment, entrepreneurship and community participation. This track focuses on practical problems affecting students, young people and their communities.

Problem: Areas teams may explore: • Campus management and student utilities • Timetable and attendance systems • Hostel and accommodation management • Peer-to-peer learning • Notes and educational resource sharing • Student communities and clubs • Event discovery and management • Mentorship and networking • Internship and employment discovery • Youth entrepreneurship • Campus communication • Student safety and accessibility • Wellbeing support tools, without attempting to replace professional care • Local transportation and mobility • Volunteer and community-service platforms • Digital civic participation • Productivity and collaboration • Financial-literacy tools for students • University administration and workflow automation

Eligibility: Conditions: • Identify a specific user and specific problem. • Demonstrate that the problem exists through research, interviews, surveys, observation or credible evidence. • Prioritise usability and accessibility rather than feature quantity. • Consider privacy and responsible handling of student data. • Be capable of functioning beyond a single demonstration environment where appropriate. • Demonstrate a plausible route towards adoption by students, institutions, organisations or communities.

Resources: Key principle: Do not build a feature looking for a problem. A simple solution that eliminates a genuine, recurring problem can score substantially higher than a feature-heavy application with little real-world value.

The Wildcard Track is open-ended, allowing teams to explore problems that do not fit neatly within the other tracks. Teams may venture into AI, cybersecurity, fintech, health-tech, climate-tech, gaming, productivity, commerce, accessibility, public infrastructure, creative technology or entirely new domains.

Problem: Areas teams may explore: • Artificial intelligence and machine learning • Cybersecurity and digital safety • Fintech and financial inclusion • Health and accessibility • Climate and environmental technology • Gaming and interactive experiences • Productivity and collaboration • E-commerce and local commerce • Public services • Disaster resilience • Smart infrastructure • Creative technology • Data and analytics • Emerging technologies • Any other clearly defined problem domain

Eligibility: Conditions: • A clearly articulated problem • A defined target user or beneficiary • Meaningful innovation • Technical execution • A functional prototype or demonstrable proof of concept • A credible use case • Evidence that the proposed solution provides value over existing alternatives • Consideration of security, privacy, ethics and safety where applicable • Potential for further development or real-world deployment

Resources: Key principle: The Wildcard Track is open-ended, but it is not an anything-goes category. Technological novelty alone is not sufficient. Using GPT, blockchain, computer vision, IoT or another emerging technology does not constitute innovation by itself; judges should ask: What problem is being solved, for whom, and why is this solution meaningfully better?