It is now only a few weeks until eager Campuseros from all over Europe descend on Berlin for Campus Party, a week-long technology festival taking place at the former Tempelhof Airport.
As well as 600 hours of lectures, panels and workshops across nine stages, the festival will feature a hackathon for any hackers, developers and designers who are up to the challenge of creating a mobile app in 24 hours.
The hackathon will be open to all attendees, and will be a great chance to develop prototyping skills as well as meet other like-minded developers. Entries will be judged on their usefulness, interface and originality, as well as their relevance to the European market. There will be plenty of experts, innovators and well-known speakers on hand to help out.
Prizes will be offered to the winners as well as the chance to show off your hacking and development skills to big companies, investors and media in attendance.
In addition, there will be workshops, discussions and contest around the topic of modding – visual changes and modifications of a computer’s hardware components. The festival, which has been running since 1997, has also announced that it will offer 240 hours of gaming-related conferences and competitions, as well as $100,000 in prize money in tournaments for games like StarCraft 2 and League of Legends.
Campus Party will attract 10,000 people from all over Europe and the goal of this year’s event is to retype Europe’s source code, a political project that Campus Party founder Paco Ragagales describes as ‘recreating the European digital agenda.’ Speakers will include Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho and inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and the festival will cover subjects as diverse as social media, astronomy and robotics.