Hackathons & Satellite Events
Around PyCon DE 2027 in Heidelberg, the community organizes hackathons, workshops, meetups and more — open to everyone.
Satellite Events & Initiatives
Django Girls Workshop
A free, beginner-friendly programming workshop on the Masterclass day, Monday, 19 April 2027.
Open-Source Sprints
Two days of open-source contribution right after the conference, 23–24 April 2027. Join the sprints
PyLadies at PyCon DE
PyLadies community activities and networking around the conference.
Hackathons
CHiLI — Community Hackathon in Linguistics & Informatics
📅 Friday–Saturday, 23–24 April 2027, alongside the Sprints
📍 Heidelberg
👥 Organized by Katja Konermann, Jakob Schuster & Team
CHiLI invites students from across the German-speaking region to collaborate at the intersection of language and technology. Alongside its sister event, the Conference for Computational Linguistics Students (TaCoS), CHiLI is the second non-university offer for aspiring computational linguists — with the focus on the practical application of their skills.
The 2027 hackathon is the first edition of this concept, open to up to 40 students (Bachelor or Master) in Computer Science, Data Science, Digital Humanities, General Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and alike.
Registration: details will be announced.
Format and Goals
CHiLI is an event for learning and networking. Stepping away from the routine of academic life, participants work in interdisciplinary teams with real-world data. The goal is to independently address practical challenges using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and Artificial Intelligence by working on a team project.
Advanced programming knowledge is beneficial but not strictly required, as peer-to-peer exchange and collaborative problem-solving take center stage. The two days give participants enough time to form teams, develop ideas and structure their work. The projects are presented at the end of the event and can serve as part of the students' professional portfolios.
Theme: Politics and Language Technology
The first edition takes the growing social polarization and political shifts across Europe as its starting point and asks: How do politics and language technologies go together? Where does AI support democratic values, and where does it put them at risk? And how can language technology be used to create social value?
Participants will primarily work with samples of political discourse. Working with such complex data, they are likely to observe the biases and failure modes of LLMs firsthand, and learn to be more meticulous about their tool use and more precise about their claims as NLP practitioners. Each team works on its project with guidance from experienced computational linguists.
Two Tracks
Research-oriented track — data-driven analysis and new linguistic insights, for example:
- To what extent can using parliamentary speeches of different parties influence LLMs' responses to social questions?
- How accurately can LLMs identify linguistic phenomena such as dog whistles and empty rhetoric?
Application-oriented track — functional prototypes for specific applications, for example:
- Detecting vocal patterns (pauses, pace changes, emphasis, etc.) and mapping them against content to reveal rhetorical techniques
- Automatically summarizing and explaining campaign platforms, distinguishing candidates' actual positions from rhetorical framing
Propose a Satellite Event
Planning a hackathon, workshop, meetup or another community event around the conference? We'd love to hear about it.
Call for community events: is open, selection is ongoing, no submissions after 21 February 2027.
Please get in touch via the contact form.