Duo Builders win the first DASH Configurator Hackathon

Open Housing Canada has announced the results of the DASH Configurator Hackathon, held October 16–18, 2026, with More and Better Housing Canada as partner and sponsor. Duo Builders placed first with a team score of 96.64 out of 100, ahead of locationlabs (96.56) and Morph (96.33).

The challenge

Teams had 48 hours to build a working configurator: software that takes a parcel of land, applies DASH standardized housing rules, and generates and validates a viable housing configuration. Open Housing Canada supplied the parcels, a standardized unit catalogue, the ruleset, machine-readable inputs and an output schema. Teams could work in CAD/BIM and parametric tools or build in the browser.

Five parcels were released at kickoff. Five more were released with less than a day remaining, so teams could not tune their tools to known sites.

The results

Nine teams submitted complete entries. Every one delivered a working configurator that handled all ten parcels, and every submission was valid on all ten and consistent with its 3D model. Open Housing Canada re-scored each submission from its output using the organizers’ own validator and data. The five surprise parcels counted for 60% of the team score and the five initial parcels for 40%.

• 1st — Duo Builders (Neeraj Shinde, Alex Thomas Wilson): 96.64 — $3,000
• 2nd — locationlabs (Jacob Bakken): 96.56 — $2,000
• 3rd — Morph (Anahita Oliaee, Mona Shahbazi): 96.33 — $1,000
• 4th — Slow (Morteza Malekmakan, Mohammadreza Doroodian): 96.20 — $500
• 5th — Adobe without the A (Benjamin Chen): 96.10 — $500

The top five finished within 0.54 points of each other. All nine teams finished within 2.47 points.

Why it matters

Much of the time it takes to plan new housing goes into checking designs against zoning, building and design rules by hand. When those rules are machine-readable, a configurator can test a standardized design against a specific site automatically. That is the capability DASH is building toward, and the hackathon tested it against real parcels under time pressure.

What’s next

Open Housing Canada expects to run its next hackathon in spring 2027, focused on Part 9 housing. Thank you to every participating team, to More and Better Housing Canada, and to BC Housing for its support of DASH.