about hackathon deutschland

what this is

Hackathon Deutschland is a listings directory. It tracks hackathons taking place in Germany and puts them on one page, sorted by date, with the dates, location, ticket price and prize information attached to each one, and it browses by 10 city hubs.

Right now there are 37 upcoming events listed. That number moves every week — the collection run adds what it finds, and an event drops out of the main list into the archive once it has happened. The directory is new, so expect it to be on the thin side for a while; what is here is real.

We do not run hackathons. Every listing links out to the organiser's own page, which is where registration, rules, schedules and any questions about the event itself belong. Think of this as an index, not an intermediary.

where the listings come from

Listings are gathered automatically. Once a week, on a Sunday, a collection run checks the public event platforms that German hackathon organisers actually use — Eventbrite (the eventbrite.de catalogue, not the .com one, which serves a different country), Devpost, Luma and Meetup — and collects anything that looks like a hackathon happening in Germany. Organisers can also add an event directly through the submit form.

Automated collection is the only way to keep a directory of this kind current, but it is also the part most likely to be wrong, so candidates are filtered before they are published:

• Germany only. Two hard cases here, not one. German settlers named a great deal of the United States, so there is a Hamburg in New York, a Berlin in Connecticut, a Bremen in Georgia, a Munich in North Dakota, a Dresden in Ohio and a Frankfort — note the spelling — in Kentucky. And German is the language of Austria and Switzerland too, so a German-language page is no evidence at all: Wien, Zürich, Basel and Vaduz all publish in it. An event is only accepted when something other than the city name and the language confirms it is German: a .de link, the Europe/Berlin timezone, a German university or organisation, a German address with a five-digit PLZ and a country tail, or Germany-only eligibility rules.
• Actually a hackathon. Build weekends, game jams, buildathons, datathons and hack days, code jams and similar hands-on competitions. Conferences, webinars, masterclasses and meetups that merely mention the word do not qualify, and neither do the “life hack”, “wellness hack” and “biohacking” events that share the keyword.
• Online events need a German signal. For Devpost, Luma and Meetup an online listing is only kept if something ties it here — a .de link, the Europe/Berlin timezone, Germany-only eligibility rules, or weaker hints together such as a German university and a German organiser. Prize money in euros is not one of them: Austria pays prizes in euros too. Eventbrite is the honest exception, and it cuts the other way: its online listings carry no venue at all, so the only thing left to test is the organiser's timezone — a weaker check than the rest, and one an Austrian organiser could pass. In practice the question has not come up: Eventbrite's German searches return no online events whatsoever, so everything this site takes from Eventbrite has a physical German address on it.
• Still upcoming. Past events move to an archive section rather than the main listings.
• Not a duplicate. The same event cross-posted to two platforms is matched on its link or its title and merged into one listing.

how the listings are written

Once an event is accepted, its page is read and the details are pulled out — dates normalised to German format and 24-hour times in the event's own timezone (Germany is a single zone, CET in winter and CEST in summer, and each listing keeps the offset its organiser published rather than being re-projected), prices to euros, the venue and address separated out, the banner image copied onto our own servers rather than hotlinked from the organiser.

Dates are the one thing the model does not have the final say on: where the organiser's page publishes exact start and end timestamps, those are written over whatever the model produced.

how cities work

The 10 city pages — Berlin, München, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Köln, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, Dresden, Karlsruhe — are hackathon ecosystems rather than the 10 largest municipalities in the country. Karlsruhe and Dresden are smaller than Bremen, Hannover or Nürnberg but run far denser hackathon calendars, so they get their own pages while the districts, suburbs and Bundesländer around them fold into the closest hub for browsing purposes.

So Kreuzberg, Adlershof, Potsdam, Cottbus and Rostock browse under Berlin; Garching, Martinsried, Augsburg, Ingolstadt and Regensburg under München; Altona, Kiel, Lübeck and Lüneburg under Hamburg; Eschborn, Offenbach, Darmstadt, Wiesbaden, Mainz and Saarbrücken under Frankfurt; Bonn, Leverkusen, Aachen and Siegen under Köln; Esslingen, Ludwigsburg, Tübingen and Ulm under Stuttgart; Duisburg, Essen, Dortmund, Bochum and Wuppertal under Düsseldorf; Halle (Saale), Magdeburg, Erfurt and Jena under Leipzig; Chemnitz, Görlitz, Meißen and Zwickau under Dresden; and Mannheim, Heidelberg, Ludwigshafen, Pforzheim and Freiburg under Karlsruhe. An event’s own page always shows its real venue and address — the grouping only affects which city page you find it on, because that reflects how people actually travel to these events.

Grouping stops where travel stops, and in a country this polycentric it stops often. Hannover, Bremen, Braunschweig, Göttingen, Oldenburg, Osnabrück and Wolfsburg are 150 km or more from the nearest hub with three universities of their own between them; Nürnberg — with Erlangen, Fürth, Würzburg and Bamberg behind it — is 170 km from München; Münster, Bielefeld and Paderborn are the far half of North Rhine-Westphalia; and Kassel is 190 km from Frankfurt. All twelve keep their own names rather than being filed under a hub nobody would travel from, and they appear in the main listings without a city page of their own. Names that belong to more than one place are never guessed either: a bare “Mitte”, “Neustadt”, “Halle” or “Mülheim” is only resolved once the value carries a Bundesland — Halle (Saale) folds into Leipzig while Halle (Westfalen) does not, so a bare “Halle” keeps its own name rather than being sorted into the wrong half of the country — and “Frankfurt” means Frankfurt am Main, while Frankfurt (Oder) is a different city 550 km away that browses under Berlin.

who it's for

Three groups, in roughly that order of size:

• People who want to build something. Developers, designers, data people, students and founders looking for something to enter this weekend — in their own city, or online.
• Organisers. Anyone running a hackathon in Germany who wants it found by those people. Listing is free through the submit form, and the pipeline will often find your event on its own before you get round to submitting it.
• Universities and companies. Engineering schools running a student hackathon, corporate innovation teams programming an internal build weekend, and anyone trying to see what the rest of the German calendar already looks like before picking a date of their own.

Student-run university hackathons, corporate innovation weekends, charity build days and independent game jams are all in scope. The site chrome is in English because that is the working language of most of these events; German place names and organisation names are kept as they are written, umlauts and all.

how this site makes money, and what that changes

Being listed is free and always will be — the directory would be worthless if it only contained events that paid to be in it. Organisers can optionally pay for a featured listing: a one-off €50, which puts a banner for the event across every page of the site for seven days. That is the whole of what the money buys, and the full terms are on the submit page.

It does not buy an email to our subscribers — this edition captures newsletter signups but has no outbound mail provider attached and has never sent a message, so promising a send would be promising something that cannot happen.

A featured listing buys placement and nothing else. It does not change whether an event is listed, and it does not change the order of the ordinary listings, which are sorted by date. We are not affiliated with Eventbrite, Devpost, Luma or Meetup, we are not paid by them, and outbound links to organiser pages are not affiliate links — we earn nothing when you register for an event.

editorial stance

• Completeness over curation. The aim is every German hackathon, not a shortlist of the ones we like. We do not rate, rank or review events.
• Organisers own their description. Descriptions are the organiser's own words; summaries are condensed from them, as described above. We do not add promotional claims of our own.
• Corrections are free and fast. There is no fee to fix or remove a listing, including a featured one.
• No dark patterns. No cookie wall, no third-party analytics, no advertising trackers. See the privacy policy for exactly what is and is not collected.

the rest of the network

Hackathon Deutschland is the German edition of a small network of national hackathon directories built on the same pipeline. The others are Hackathons Australia, Canada Hackathons, UK Hackathons, Hackathons USA, and Hackathon España. Each one covers its own country only: the filters, the city hubs and the currency are built for that market, so a German event will never turn up on the UK site and vice versa. They are linked in the footer of every page.

get in touch

Corrections, questions, removal requests and press enquiries all go to the same place — see the contact page. Organisers with an event to add should use the submit form.