It’s the world’s leading business networking site – and LinkedIn has chosen Berlin to host its first ever hackday in Europe. The event will take place over 24 hours on October 19 and 20 at Sankt Oberholz on Rosenthaler Platz and you can now sign up to take part.
The company, which was founded in 2002 and has 175 million users, has a tradition of dedicating one day a month to a hackday competition, with teams of engineers working on projects from scratch and then presenting them to the entire company. While that may not be possible in Berlin, there will be a jury of three experts to pick a winner.
For this first European event, the challenge is to come up with something that is functional, useful and elegant and which serves a very real purpose – whether at work or in your personal life.
The hackday starts at 5pm on Friday October 19, with final judging 24 hours later. There are plenty of Apple goodies up for grabs as prizes – MacBook Airs for everyone on the winning team and iPads for second place, while third prize is a €100 Visa card. Organisers have also promised to unveil a “huge” prize at the venue.
The jury consists of Rahul Vora, CEO of Rapportive, SoundCloud’s VP engineering Alexander Grosse and a third judge to be confirmed.
Participants can get in touch with other hackers via the Berlin Hackday Group on LinkedIn. Projects should be created from scratch, but any code produced will remain the property of its creators.
The choice of Berlin is hardly surprising as LinkedIn continues to focus on Germany. It launched in German in 2009 and set up an office in Munich in 2011. There are currently around 2.5 million LinkedIn users in the German-speaking DACH region.
And the upcoming event will not only provide the opportunity to grow that number, but also to tap into the tech scene in Berlin, efforts in which LinkedIn is joining the likes of Twitter and Google. Sankt Oberholz, meanwhile, should provide the perfect atmosphere for the Hackday.
So get involved now!