Start a Chapter

Run a chapter without rebuilding the wheel.

A dashboard, a hub site template, five operational playbooks, and a shared sponsor pipeline — everything a founding eboard needs, in one place. Free, open-source, and battle-tested at MAIC.

No club yet?

Start from scratch

Sign up for the dashboard, fork the hub-site template, run the “Getting Started” playbook. Your first event is on the calendar this week.

Sign up — create a chapter
Already running a club?

Connect existing chapter

Keep your identity. Plug into the dashboard, swap your website to the hub template (or just hit the JSON content API), and join the shared sponsor pipeline.

Sign up — claim your chapter
01 Day 1

Stand up your chapter.

One afternoon: sign up for the dashboard, fork the hub-site template, push to deploy. Your chapter has a live operations backend AND a public website on the same day — that’s the headline difference between joining the network and starting from scratch.

MAIC's first event of the 2024 season — full room of new members
MAIC’s first event of the season · Fall 2024

A The chapter dashboard

dashboard.all-ai-network.org is the operational core. Events, members, projects, sponsors, leaderboards — one login, everything connected.

Plus five more dashboard surfaces officers use every week:

Events & QR check-in

Create events with a single form. Each one gets a printable QR code; members scan to check in and earn points. Check-in history feeds the chapter leaderboard automatically.

Sponsor inbox & proposals

Every sponsor inquiry — from your hub site form or the sponsor portal — lands in your dashboard inbox. Accept or decline proposals; emails go out automatically.

Reports + exports

Attendance heatmaps, semester reports, sponsor ROI summaries. One-click export for advisor reports, year-end officer handoffs, and grant applications.

Hub-site sync

One public endpoint wires any site — ours or your own — to your real data: events, members, leaderboard, projects, learning tree. No API key, no duplicated data entry. Read the API docs.

Badges + points

Custom badges per chapter (“ROSIE Award winner”, “Hackathon champion”) plus a points system you can wire to whatever rewards make sense at your school.

1 ALL Applied AI Network Spring 2025 graduate outcomes among active members (≥2 chapter events in a semester or ≥1 project event), across all majors. Compared against the same universities’ non-member graduate cohort.

B Your chapter website

Fork aain-hub-template, edit one config file, push to deploy. Auto-pulls curriculum, playbooks, and workshops from the shared content library; the “What you get” list reads live from the template repo’s README.

1

Use the template

One click on GitHub — you get a full repo with dark theme, event pages, leaderboards, and sponsor showcase.

2

Edit hub.config.json

Set chapter name, university, colors, officers, social links. One file. Everything on the site updates from it.

3

Push to deploy

GitHub Actions deploys to GitHub Pages on push. Optional: we’ll wire your-hub.all-ai-network.org as a custom subdomain.

What you get

Live list from aain-hub-template’s README, re-fetched on every site build.

  • Loading from repo…

Live demo + repo

See the deployed template before you fork.

Already have a website? You can also fetch the curriculum and playbooks directly: fetch("https://all-ai-network.org/manifest.json"). No SDK, no auth.

By the end of day one your chapter has a live operations backend AND a public website — no spreadsheets, no DIY Stripe wiring, no static-site config. Every improvement we ship next quarter rolls out to your chapter automatically.

The playbook

Your first three weeks decide your year.

Miss that window and you spend the rest of the year recruiting instead of building. Here is the shape of it.

  1. Week 0Org fair. Collect an interest list.
  2. Week 1Say the whole year out loud.
  3. Week 3First real event. Book a great speaker.
  4. Week 5Project kick-off. Teams announced.
Start with Day 1 ↓

This page is the Getting Started playbook, written by the eboard that grew MAIC from 20 to 500+. The other four playbooks cover speakers, innovation labs, research groups and hackathons.

02 First event

Run events that matter.

Five operational playbooks battle-tested at MAIC — speaker series, hackathons, innovation labs, research groups, and the “getting started” arc. Each one is a complete blueprint, not a checklist: real numbers, candid retrospectives, what we’d do differently. Pick the format that fits this week and ship it.

Hands-on Projects kickoff event at MAIC — full crowd
Hands-on Projects kickoff · MAIC, Fall 2024

Need session-level material to actually run? The Learning Tree ships with workshops (Build a Chatbot, Intro to RAG, Git for Students, more) you can run at your next meeting — full facilitator guides included.

03 First semester

Get sponsored.

Companies are already on the network looking for chapters to back — this isn’t a year-one project. The sponsor portal does the front of the funnel: companies sign up, browse chapters, find you automatically. Your eboard owns the relationship.

MAIC student receiving the $5,000 first-place check at the ROSIE Awards, presented by Dwight Diercks
ROSIE Awards 1st place · $5K prize from NVIDIA co-founder Dwight Diercks
A

Sponsors find you

Companies sign up at sponsors.all-ai-network.org and browse chapters. They see your real data: members, recent events, tech focus, opt-in talent. No outreach required from you.

B

You review proposals

Tier + amount + message land in dashboard.all-ai-network.org/sponsorsProposals. Accept, decline, or counter with a note — the sponsor gets emailed automatically.

C

Money goes to your chapter’s work

Sponsorships are tax-deductible gifts to ALL Applied AI Network Foundation, restricted to your chapter’s programs. We take no cut and there are no transaction fees or escrow — the Foundation holds the funds, your chapter spends them.

New to this? The Speaker Series playbook covers the route most of our sponsors actually took — they spoke first and funded later, which is a far warmer ask than a cold email. Already have sponsors? Send them sponsors.all-ai-network.org to onboard onto the platform.

Ready to start your chapter?

Sign up for the dashboard and you’ll have events, members, and a leaderboard before your first meeting. We’ll get your hub-site subdomain wired the same week.