VCONIC Challenge

New this year is the VCON MCP server

https://www.conserver.io/mcp-server/what-is-the-vcon-mcp-server. or mcp.conserver.io

Prize Pot $5K

Virtual event, to register send email to info @ tadhack.com with your name and email.

Training sessions

We have planned a number of live and recorded sessions:

The VCON MCP Server with Thomas McCarty Howe. Friday 30th Jan at noon ET, and Friday 6th March at noon ET.

AI Coding for Beginners with Rob Pickering (a Coding CEO), Tuesday 10th Feb noon ET.

Consent and Lifecycle with Thomas McCarty-Howe, CTO VCONIC, Friday 13th Feb at noon ET.

Spec-Driven Development with Jason Goecke (a Coding CEO), Tuesday 17th Feb at noon ET.

VCON + UNS for manufacturing / process industries with Matthew Smith, Tuesday 24th Feb at Noon ET.

The VCON app Store with Audrey Hayn, co-founder MindMaking, Friday 27th Feb at noon ET.

If you’ve already registered for TADHack you’ll received a calendar invite to these sessions.

Conversations Happen Everywhere

Most businesses have conversations happening everywhere. Phone calls, video meetings, chat messages, emails. These conversations contain valuable information, but they are usually scattered across different systems. Each system stores data in its own format. This makes it hard to:

• Search across different types of conversations;
• Analyze patterns over time;
• Share conversation data between tools;
• Work with AI assistants on conversation history; and
• Maintain privacy and compliance standards.

You might have customer support calls in one system, sales meetings in another, and email threads in yet another. To get a complete picture, you would need to check all three systems separately. That takes time and effort.

The VCON MCP Server

Friday 30th Jan at noon ET, and Friday 6th March at noon ET.

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It is a way for AI assistants to use external tools and data sources. Without MCP, AI assistants can only work with the information they learned during training. They cannot access your live data or perform actions in your systems.

With MCP, an AI assistant can:

• Read data from your databases;
• Perform actions using your tools;
• Access real-time information; and
• Maintain context about what you are working on.

Think of MCP like giving an AI assistant access to your toolbox. The assistant can see what tools are available, understand what each tool does, and use them when you ask. This makes AI assistants much more useful for real work.

The vCon MCP Server lets AI assistants work with conversation data stored in vCon format. You connect the server to an AI assistant like Claude, and then the assistant can:

• Create new conversation records;
• Search through historical conversations;
• Analyze conversations for insights;
• Organize conversations with tags; and
• Answer questions about your conversation data.

The server speaks the MCP protocol, which AI assistants understand. When you ask the assistant to do something with conversation data, it uses the server’s tools to get the job done.

What Can The VCON MCP Server Do?

• Store conversations – The server can store conversations in vCon format, following the IETF standard exactly.
• Search conversations – You can search in four different ways:
  • Basic filtering by subject, participants, or dates;
  • Keyword search that looks for exact words;
  • Semantic search that finds conversations by meaning, even if the exact words are different; and
  • Hybrid search that combines keyword and semantic approaches.
• Organize with tags – You can add tags to conversations for easy organization and filtering. Tags work like labels you might put on file folders.
• Analyze and monitor – The server can provide analytics about your conversation database, showing growth trends, content patterns, and health metrics.
• Manage components – You can add or update different parts of a conversation, like adding analysis results or attaching files, without recreating the whole conversation.
• Use templates – The server includes templates for common conversation types, making it easier to create new records.
• Extend with plugins – The server supports plugins that can add custom functionality, like privacy controls or compliance features.

The ChatGPT app store

Recently OpenAI launched its App Directory to browse all the tools currently available and opened its SDK for developers to build new interactive experiences that operate within the bot’s UI. This move transforms the chatbot into a distribution platform where users can access services like Apple Music, Booking.com, and Spotify directly through chat conversations.

All those apps in the ChatGPT app store are based on MCP. Vconic TADHack will help you take advantage of this new distribution opportunity.

Imagine the Possibilities 

A patient has a conversation with their primary care doctor at their face to face appointment, in that conversation a recommendation is made and captured in the visit summary. The recommendation needs the patient’s specialist’s approval. Only if the patient remembers and asks is the action followed up with the specialist. Often such conversations are missed. With the VCON MCP server, conversations with the patient across multiple platforms are captured, correlated, and compliance is ensured. All done with the patient’s consent and permissioning enabling them to exercise their digital rights, and organizations to use conversation data in compliance with those rights. 

Put your thinking caps on and think about problems you face in your home, work and community lives. How can the VCON MCP Server make your life better in 2026?

Stretch Objective: add the SIP Extension for Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Read more here, https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-howe-sipcore-mcp-extension/

How do you discover a new MCP? This Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) extension advertises support for, negotiate, and carry the Model Context Protocol (MCP).  

It defines:
(1) a new SIP option-tag (“mcp”);
(2) new header fields for capability advertisement and selection;
(3) Contact feature-capability parameters for registration-time discovery; and
(4) the “application/mcp+json” media type.  

MCP payloads can be exchanged during session establishment and mid-dialog using INVITE/200 (Offer/Answer), MESSAGE, and INFO.

Sessions Before VCONIC TADHack

Leading up to the hackathon on March 7-8 (Saturday / Sunday) we’ll have training sessions on the VCON MCP Server and the SIP Extension for Model Context Protocol (MCP). Scheduled for Friday 30th Jan at noon ET, and Friday 6th March at noon ET.

In addition to VCON training we’ll have sessions focused on interesting topics for developers, given by “coding CEOs” who have been part of TADHack since its beginning in 2014.

Spec-Driven Development with Jason Goecke (a Coding CEO)

Tuesday 17th Feb at noon ET.

Here are the slides Jason plans to use.

AI Without Specifications = Expensive, Fast Chaos.

The reality: Vague Idea → AI Interprets → Wrong Code Generated Fast → “That’s not what I meant” → More AI → More Wrong Code → Faster Failure Cycles → Expensive Chaos. AI doesn’t fix unclear requirements. It amplifies them at 10x speed.

What Is Spec-Driven Development? A development method where executable specifications—not verbal requirements or user stories—serve as the single source of truth defining WHAT to build, WHY to build it, and HOW to prove it’s correct.

SDD creates the precision foundation that enables AI to deliver production-ready code systematically, transforming development from an unpredictable craft into a scalable engineering discipline.

It MUST be:

• Performance requirements (measurable)
• Security requirements (testable)
• Reliability requirements (verifiable)
• Compliance requirements (auditable)

GitHub Spec-Kit is the framework that makes Spec-Driven Development practical and scalable. Built by GitHub Engineering for GitHub.com’s 200M+ users, it’s the foundation that transforms SDD from theory into competitive reality. This isn’t experimental technology—it’s production-proven infrastructure available to your organization today.

Jason is a long-time supporter of TADS, we’re proud he’s sharing with developers his expertise in AI Coding.

AI Coding for Beginners with Rob Pickering (a Coding CEO)

Tuesday 10th Feb noon ET.

Rob is a long-time supporter of TADS, we’re proud he’s sharing with developers his expertise in AI Coding. He took part in a TADSummit session on AI Coding last year, https://blog.tadsummit.com/2025/10/16/ai-coding/.

  – What solutions and tools are working reliably for us.

  – Areas that are not yet mature or reliable.

  – Our perspective on the current state and future direction of AI-assisted development.

This pragmatic approach that will be highly relevant for students.

The VCON app Store with Audrey Hayn, co-founder MindMaking

Friday 27th Feb at noon ET.

Audrey Hayn, co-founder MindMaking, on their work in creating the vCon Store. 

To help focus the initial work, they are focused on small medium enterprises, and the challenges they face. MindMaking are building:

• vCon App Store, focused on SMB applications.
• Complete infrastructure, including publishing and billing.
• Native applications: custom dashboards and tools.
• Developer ecosystem.

What MindMaking provides is:

• vCon compliant infrastructure
• Marketplace and distribution to SMB.
• Integrated billing for payments and subscriptions.
• Support.

The platform is offered through ITSPs (Internet Telephony Service Providers), Managed Service Providers, and Resellers. 

To get involved email apply@mindmaking.com.

To all the TADHackers, you now have a path to cash $$$, for the skills you’ve built at VCONIC TADHack.

Consent and Lifecycle with Thomas McCarty-Howe, CTO VCONIC

Friday 13th Feb at noon ET.

What consent means today has evolved beyond the simple TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) term of telephone / communications consent. Its now consent for purpose, and its dynamic.

The purpose includes for example AI training, text and data mining, etc. It’s not consent forever, it’s consent with term limits. Remember when Facebook bought WhatsApp, I know many people who would have preferred to withdraw their consent at that announcement. To my car buying example, the consent could be for 2 months as the car should be bought within that time.

This shift enables a better alignment with data privacy and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) laws. This is the next step in vCon, and demonstrates an important shift in where the IETF is going.

Thomas then shared some slides around the vCon plans and the 2 sides: enabling citizens to exercise their digital rights, and organizations to use conversation data in compliance with those rights. Put simply, it protects people and feeds the robots.

The update is the consent extension that is paired with the media. In the example below its given verbally in the dialog, what the consent covers, and its term limits. Thomas goes into much more details in the video, for example on the anatomy of consent: party identification. dialog references, temporal validity, granular permissions, and cryptographic proof.

The consent extension also includes a link to the terms of service, the consent ledger, and AI-Pref (common vocabulary on what the AI preferences mean). This is not just a US/EU issue, even across the 50 states there’s a need for a common vocabulary.

I love this phrase, “Consent, unlike love is not forever.” We then compared notes on all the real world examples of where this dynamic permission applies. Thomas then reviews all the events in a vCon lifecycle. And for me the most impressive ability is for vCon to work effectively across national / international regulation, the differences between data processors and controllers, and for a citizen to know what happened to their data. 

VCON + UNS for manufacturing / process industries with Matthew Smith

Tuesday 24th Feb at Noon ET

For those TADHackers in manufacturing, or simply interested in the topic, Matthew showed earlier this year how Unified Name Space, MQTT, VCON, are critical components of modern manufacturing and process industry operations.

vCon made the list as on the factory floor or in the field there are many conversations, and those conversations are lost. vCon enables the conversations to be remembered, and the chain of conversations that led to a decision on the production line is now transparent. Human to human interaction is part of the OT (Operations Technology) loop but until now has been handled separately from the supervisory and process control data stream.

Matthew shared a vision on how Telecoms, Operations Technology, and Information Technology can work together thanks to IETF standards like VCON. This session will add flesh on the bones of the ideas shared earlier this year and look at the future of OT & IT convergence. We hope TADHackers will use their experiences at TADHack to bring VCON everywhere.