hack your city: stuttgart

What is hack your city? Round up 30 motivated people for one weekend, give them a topic to work on, provide food and drinks. After two intense days, what you end up with are great ideas, first prototypes and new friends. All of these with the mutual benefit of making cities better places to live. So it's actually nothing to be afraid of, despite the negative connotations of 'hacking'.

Hack your city is a hackathon-series that started in Germany this year. The idea behind the event is to create new forms of civil engagement, especially for young and tech savvy citizens. The Stuttgart event was initialised by Fraunhofer IAO and inspired by the events of wissenschaft im dialog. It took place on the premises of Fraunhofer. moovel lab supported the organisation team with thematic input and documentation: Check out our video...

The thought of putting people together, giving them a topic to think about, and not knowing what the outcome might be unleashes great creative potential. Mixing people with different backgrounds opens new perspectives and opportunities to tackle challenges. It also resembles the way moovel lab works, which is one of the things we love about hack your city and similar events.

We hope this has not been the last hack your city event. For us it has been a great weekend which we would like to repeat in the future. A big thx goes out to Felix Wiedemann and Björn Karmann for their camera work and the Fraunhofer team for the organisation effort.

Also check out Fraunhofer's blog posts on the event (part 1 & part 2)