The potential for synthetic research based on aggregating, integrating, and re-using data is enormous, yet most resources remain interoperable. To realize this potential, software and databases that handle evolutionary trees (and their associated annotations) must be interoperable. Interoperability, in turn, requires tools based on common standards. In the past few years, evolutionary informaticists, with help from NESCent, have been building a software toolbox for solving interoperability problems, based on the EvoIO “stack” of NeXML, CDAO and PhyloWS. This toolbox makes it possible to begin building a worldwide network of interoperable evolutionary resources. The HIP (Hackathons, Interoperability, Phylogenies) aims to use the hackathon mechanism (which we have helped to develop at NESCent) to grow this network directly, by adding links to it, and indirectly, by creating examples for others to follow. To support this project within a working-group budget, we leverage support from strategic partners. Each of the planned series of 3 hackathons will bring together scientific programmers with related challenges. The hackathons target early-career scientists, who often have the most technical expertise and the most potential to pass along their skills and enthusiasm.