Project Inquiry: Chipathon Knowledge Hub + “Ask Chipathon” Chatbot

[yours-truly-anshika]

Hi @msaligane and the OpenROAD community,

I'm writing to express my strong interest in the Chipathon Knowledge Hub + “Ask Chipathon” Chatbot project. Coming from an Electronics and Communication Engineering background with hands-on experience in software development and AI/ML, the intersection of EDA tooling and generative AI in this project really stands out to me.

I have read through the OpenROAD Chipathon project detials and understand that the primary goal here is to reduce the maintainer load by centralizing knowledge to help participants.

While digging into it, I came across two related repositories: sscs-ose/sscs-chipathon-2025 and sscs-ose/sscs-chipathon-2026. Before I put together a proof-of-concept for my contribution proposal, I want to make sure I understand the current state of the data and the intended workflow:

1. Repository Destination: Are the sscs-chipathon-2025/2026 repositories where the new Knowledge Hub and RAG CLI will be officially hosted and maintained? If not, are these the best repos for me to review past participant workflows, common issues, and PRs to get an idea of the problems the chatbot needs to solve?
2. Historical Data Storage: Where do the bulk of the past Chipathon FAQs and canonical answers currently reside? Are we primarily looking at parsing exports from specific Slack/Discord channels, scattered GitHub Issues in the ORFS repo, or existing Google Docs?
3. Data Ingestion Challenges: Are there any known formatting inconsistencies or missing contexts in this historical data that I should anticipate when designing the chunking strategy for the vector database?
4. Safe Fallback Protocol: For the RAG bot's fallback behavior (when retrieval confidence is low), is there a preferred triage protocol or a specific set of OpenROAD logs (e.g., synthesis or routing logs) that mentors typically ask participants to check first?

I plan to start tackling some "good first issues" shortly to get familiar with the current workflow. Thanks for your time, and I look forward to potentially contributing to the OpenROAD ecosystem!

Best regards,
Anshika

[luarss]

Hi @yours-truly-anshika, please check out the following link for the finalised projects. We have also created a discord for this year's edition, do hop on and say hi!

Project List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X6xxUonxgEQ_iD5G5vFp2ZOH1vbkRSspEdYrpSf4khE/edit?usp=sharing
Discord Link: https://discord.gg/axCZmUbH