All participants and volunteers must agree to abide by the following Code of Conduct.
Participants
Undergraduate students from any higher education institution in the Northern California Region are eligible to participate. This is a team competition with between 2-5 students per team.
Looking for a team? Put your name down on this Team Formation sheet and join the 2026 NorCal DataFest Discord server to chat with other people who are looking for a team. Once you have a team of at least 2, return here and register your team.
Should members of your team drop out at the last minute, you might be merged with another team who is also missing members.
See the Chico State Participant guide for more information.
Event Volunteers
This could be as a Coach, a Judge or a general event volunteer.
Coach
Coaches walk around and talk with teams to see how they’re doing. Help them brainstorm ideas, refine ideas and most importantly help them come back to reality in what is feasible in the 2 day period. Sometimes teams have amazing ideas but either the data they need to answer their question isn’t collected/available, or the effort to complete the idea is much larger than they realize. So trimming down ideas. This is a common place for Masters students to participate.
Experience with coding languages can be helpful, but not necessary. A general ability to help them google the information is enough. For example, one year the competition data involved certain substance use rates across a geographic area. Some teams wanted to pull in census data to correlate population demographic with substance use at the county level. That team needed help figuring out where to get county level census information, identifying what keys to join on and thinking about what level of aggregation was reasonable to match on or display.
Judge
Judges spend a few hours on Sunday listening to presentations, deliberating and awarding prizes. We strive to have a diverse panel of judges with at least one subject matter expert.
Event Volunteer
This is a fully volunteer run event! We need people to do food pickups and meal setup, setup and breakdown, staff the registration desk to check students in, keep the snack table stocked, put up signage and answer questions as needed.
See the Other Volunteer guide for more information.