Intuit Hackathon

[srachit]

So Intuit is planning on hosting a hackathon at my university and I'm planning on attending. These are the different challenges they have put up for us:
http://www.hackathon.io/intuit/rules

I'm planning on working on challenge 1- Emergency chat room. I am thinking of using the Spark chat IM(http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/spark/)
I wanted to know if anyone knew of any other open source chat systems that may be better to work with?

Also if you'll have any nice ideas that I could implement feel free to share them!