Digitally, creatively and innovatively shaping tomorrow's labour unions.

Labour Digital – or LD for short – supports trade unions and NGOs in the identification, development, and implementation of digital solutions. Founded in an environment close to the labour unions, the young technology start-up is dedicated to their future. Labour Digital is the idea generator, initiator, and main organizer of the Union Hack.

The Union Hack is a joint project by the DGB labour unions. The following unions have already agreed to participate: Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB), IG Metall, ver.di, IG BCE, IG BAU. The organizers are currently in exchange with other DGB unions. If your union is not yet among them, please contact them about the Union Hack and get in touch with us if you are interested.

6 million Labour Union members are fighting to ensure that over 50% of the working population in Germany receive better working conditions.

Their central mission is to negotiate with employers on improvements in salaries, working hours, legal protection. Currently there are more than 77.000 collective wage agreements in place securing the working conditions of more than 20 million employees. Labour Unions represent their members in the companies, grant legal protection in labour and social law disputes and support their members in the event of strikes, lock-outs and disciplinary measures. They offer qualifications and skill trainings, and provide advice and support in all employment related questions.

Labour Unions in Germany are thus powerful political players with a long history and have an immense impact on the German labour market policy.

Anyone who is interested in working in mixed teams to develop solutions to the unions challenges can participate. A membership or previous union experience is NOT mandatory for participating in the Union Hack. No matter what your professional background is, most important is that you want to use your creative, professional, technical, methodological, thematic or graphic skills in a solution-oriented way.

To sign up as a participant simply use our sign-up form link). To ensure a good composition of teams with mixed perspectives and skills, we will ask your to not only provide us with your contact details but also to tell us about your skills and motivation.

You are welcome to indicate which challenges you’d preferably participate in in our sign-up form. We try to consider all preferences. The actual assignment to a specific challenge will be done by Labour Digital.

As part of the sign-up form you can tell us which challenges you are most interested in. Labour Digital tries to take all preferences into account when assigning participants to teams and challenges.

Sure, Labour Digital simply assigns you a challenge. If you prefer to indicate a preference, you can simply do this via our sign-up form.

First and foremost: First come first serve! So sign up now! For the specific selection and composition of teams, our focus is on creating balanced, cross-functional groups that we believe have cool, innovative approaches, creative, technical solutions and a certain gut feeling for the added values and challenges of the unions. This means: the more and the more colourful the expertises the better. At the same time, we make sure that all teams are fair and balanced, no matter what challenge they face – because of course there is some price money at stake as well.

Labour Digital (i.e. the organiser) selects the participants.

Anyone who is interested in working in mixed teams to develop solutions to the unions challenges can participate. A membership or previous experience with unions is NOT mandatory for participating in the Union Hack. No matter what your professional background is, most important is that you want to use your creative, professional, technical, methodological, thematic or graphic skills in a solution-oriented way.

We start on Friday (20.11.2020) at 10am. After starting the event together with all participants of the event you will get time for a conception phase with your team, so that the 24h hack-time will start in the early afternoon. With the recording of your video presentation the Union Hack will end on Saturday evening at 8.30pm. You can find the preliminary program and time schedule here: [PDF]

If you already have a team you can use our team sign-up. If you do not have a team yet – no problem. We connect you to other awesome participants and create great teams. It is crucial for us that your skill sets, expertise and interests complement each other well.

The team size can vary between 3 and 7 participants.

Both English and German speaking participants are welcome. We make sure that the teams are put together in such a way that you will understand each other.

That depends on you or your team. Nobody is forced to stay up all night, but part of what makes a hackathon special is the possibility to spend a limited time (24 hours) completely dedicated to a problem. In general we recommend to communicate transparently and simply coordinate things with your team mates. Who needs what and how can we make sure that we use the available time as efficiently as possible?

You create a short video in which you present your prototype. This video will then be forwarded to the jury.

At the end of the hackathon the prototypes should give a real impression of how the finished product would feel. That means: no 50-page concept but rather an animated click-dummy.

There is a selection committee that selects the most suitable of all submitted challenges. The panel includes Labour Digital and representatives from the unions involved. One of the main selection criteria is that the challenges should be relevant to all DGB unions. Additionally, they should pose a tricky problem where the solution will have an actual positive impact – no endless theory. Finally, of course we need to make sure that it is feasible to handle the challenge in 24hrs. It is possible that several submitted challenges are combined into one overall challenge block and that a challenge-sponsor-team will be chosen to support all challenges of this block.

The challenge sponsors represent and accompany a challenge during the hackathon. As challenge sponsors they present the challenge in the plenum, answer questions and support the teams in developing a solution for the problem. Before and during the Union Hack the challenge sponsors are supported by coaches. Also, a joint pre-time (e.g. substantiate the context and problems) with all necessary information will take place in advance.

The challenge sponsor are those colleagues of the unions that have submitted a challenge and whose challenge has been selected for the Union Hack.

As basic technical equipment you need a mobile device (ideally a computer, laptop, or tablet) with camera, loudspeaker and microphone as well as a stable internet connection. We will inform you in advance which applications and tools we will use for the Hackathon so that you can prepare yourself accordingly. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at any time!

A hackathon lives from mutual exchange – both in the team and in the plenum. The event will therefore have different formats that allow the participants to interact in different contexts. We will create different virtual rooms in which you can move around. These range from the coffee kitchen, workshops, and team rooms to the Union Hack Forum. You will find out exactly how all this works in the week before the event. The only important thing is that for the duration of the hackathon you set yourself up in such a way that you’ll be able to communicate freely and you don’t disturb anybody while you’re video conferencing in the middle of the night.