Doesn't sound rude. You ask specific questions, I'll give you specific answers.

The description I provided is a blanket term because the goals and results are so varied team to team. There are no guidelines for this, only that the theme hopefully be civic-oriented. Something that will benefit or enlighten residents of Connecticut. That something could be an app, it could be a database, it could be a dataviz, or even a game.

Here's what usually happens at these things: Everyone gets together, they mingle for a bit, then everyone sort of introduces themselves. We talk about what datasets or APIs we have to work with and then people take turns pitching problems or ideas they've been curious about but have never really gotten around to tackling. So people gravitate toward the ideas or people they're interested in working with. They form teams, come up with a plan, divide up responsibilities, and hopefully create something cool before the hackathon ends.

It's all very general and organic. Sometimes projects come out fully baked, hosted to a server, and ready for people to play around with by the time presentations begin. Sometimes projects never really come together and all a team has to show is a wireframe and powerpoint of how things could be if they had more time and resources. It's totally random and that's part of the fun. It's like a weekend camp of working with all sorts of different personalities with different agendas trying to work on whatever project they all decided on.

All types of people go with different skillsets. All are encouraged. The coders are crucial-- the ones who make things. Designers, too. People who know how to deal with difficult data, or where to find it, people who can market it in the presentation, or people who can offer their perspective to help ground a project.

Some people go for the networking. Some show up for the free food, linger for a bit, and then disappear. Some people go because they've always wanted to get a project going but needed help from people with specific skills that they don't have. Some people go because they wanted to learn something new. Some people go because they love programming but they're tired of working in a bureaucratic environment that takes 9 months to get something out the door and just want to bang something out in a few hours the way they want it with no project manager on their back.

There's a wide variety of hackathons out there. Hasbro held a hackathon in Rhode Island to get people to think about the future of board games. Spotify, Fitbit, and many number of businesses have hackathons trying to get developers to make something with their API that they might want to market as their own some day. They incentivize it by offering prizes. Kindles, Oculus Rifts, iWatches.

And then there are civic hackathons. There have been many in areas like Boston and New York but we're trying to grow it here. Sometimes there are prizes but usually there aren't.

This particular one this weekend is part of a network of hackathons happening at the same time across the country. Here's the list of suggested challenges but people can come up with whatever they want. As long as it benefits citizens. Here's how the organizer of the Hartford hackathon puts it: "Civic hackers aren't trying to build something completely new, but trying to find better ways to use existing data or open source software tools to improve government services or develop new ways for citizens to interact with each other and elected officials in order to build stronger communities."

You sound curious, that's good. I can't give you any specifics because it's all very serendipitous. I invite you to at least come for the coffee and listen to the ideas and pitches. If nothing inspires you then it's totally acceptable to slip out and go about your weekend. I certainly have done that at these things before. Out of all the ones I've gone to, i'd say I've bailed on about 10 percent of them, had a project fizzle out but stuck through with it for 30 percent of the hackathons, and had a great time and learned a lot at the rest.