PoliTech Hackathon
In mid-June, the Urban Innovation Hub Heilbronn became a space of creativity, collaboration, and civic innovation. The first PoliTech Hackathon, organized by Public Makers in partnership with Nexus Politics, brought together 40 students from TUM Campus Heilbronn and Hochschule Heilbronn. Over the course of a single day, they worked intensively in 10 teams on three challenges developed by Nexus Politics — all united by one goal: using technology to strengthen democracy.
The Challenges
The hackathon focused on three pressing questions in digital democracy and civic tech:
1. Who is responsible? – Political Mapping of Citizen Concerns
Teams built tools that analyze citizen input and identify the appropriate political body responsible for the issue.
Winner: Team GovGuide
2. Political Heatmap – Problem Visualization with Filter Function
Participants created interactive maps to visualize and explore citizen concerns, providing both policymakers and the public with new ways to understand what matters most.
Winner: Team Diversity Wins Hackathons
3. Early Warning System – Predicting Emerging Issues
Using machine learning, participants developed prototypes to detect trends in political discourse, offering decision-makers a way to anticipate and respond to emerging issues.
Winner: The Oskars
Recognizing the Teams
The jury, consisting of Jan Bastian (TUM Venture Labs) and Christoph Waffler (Nexus Politics), had the challenging task of selecting winners from a strong field of innovative solutions. Their expertise ensured that the most impactful ideas received recognition.
More than Code
The PoliTech Hackathon demonstrated that programming is more than just commits, libraries, or models. When applied to politics and the public sector, code becomes a means of creating tangible impact — from guiding citizens to the right institutions, to helping policymakers respond proactively to societal trends.
We would like to thank TUM Campus Heilbronn for supporting this initiative and for sharing our vision of empowering the next generation to use technology for societal good. The hackathon was a clear reminder that the future of democracy is not only debated in parliaments and classrooms, but also prototyped in spaces where young people, ideas, and technology meet.
