about hackathon france

what this is

Hackathon France is a listings directory. It tracks hackathons taking place in France and puts them on one page, sorted by date, with the dates, location, ticket price and prize information attached to each one, and it browses by 10 city hubs.

Right now there are 6 upcoming events listed. That number moves every week — the collection run adds what it finds, and an event drops out of the main list into the archive once it has happened. The directory is new, so expect it to be on the thin side for a while; what is here is real.

We do not run hackathons. Every listing links out to the organiser's own page, which is where registration, rules, schedules and any questions about the event itself belong. Think of this as an index, not an intermediary.

where the listings come from

Listings are gathered automatically. Once a week, on a Sunday, a collection run checks the public event platforms that French hackathon organisers actually use — Eventbrite (the eventbrite.fr catalogue, not the .com one, which serves a different country), Devpost, Luma and Meetup — and collects anything that looks like a hackathon happening in France. Organisers can also add an event directly through the submit form.

Automated collection is the only way to keep a directory of this kind current, but it is also the part most likely to be wrong, so candidates are filtered before they are published:

• France only. Two hard cases here, not one. French settlers named a great deal of North America, so there is a Paris in Texas and another in Ontario, a Lyons in New York, an Orleans in Louisiana, a Versailles in Kentucky, a Montpelier — note the single “l” — in Vermont and a Laval outside Montréal. And French is the language of Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Monaco, Québec and some twenty countries in Africa, so a French-language page is no evidence at all: Bruxelles, Genève, Lausanne, Luxembourg, Montréal, Dakar, Abidjan, Casablanca and Tunis all publish in it, print “rue” and “gratuit”, and use the same month names. An event is only accepted when something other than the city name and the language confirms it is French: a .fr link, the Europe/Paris timezone, a French university or organisation, a French address with a five-digit code postal and a country tail, or France-only eligibility rules.
• Actually a hackathon. Build weekends, game jams, buildathons, datathons and hack days, code jams and similar hands-on competitions. Conferences, webinars, masterclasses and meetups that merely mention the word do not qualify, and neither do the “life hack”, “wellness hack” and “biohacking” events that share the keyword.
• Online events need a French signal. For Devpost, Luma and Meetup an online listing is only kept if something ties it here — a .fr link, the Europe/Paris timezone, France-only eligibility rules, or weaker hints together such as a French university and a French organiser. Prize money in euros is not one of them: Belgium, Luxembourg and Monaco pay prizes in euros too. Eventbrite is the honest exception, and it cuts the other way: its online listings carry no venue at all, so the only thing left to test is the organiser's timezone — a weaker check than the rest, and one a Belgian organiser could pass, since Brussels is an hour's train from Lille. In practice that check is not carrying anything at the moment: Eventbrite files online events under a global listing of its own rather than under any French place, so searching France returns none of them, and every event we hold from Eventbrite today has a physical French address. We would rather tell you where the weak joint is than wait to be asked.
• Still upcoming. Past events move to an archive section rather than the main listings.
• Not a duplicate. The same event cross-posted to two platforms is matched on its link or its title and merged into one listing.

how the listings are written

Once an event is accepted, its page is read and the details are pulled out — dates normalised to French format and 24-hour times in the event's own timezone (metropolitan France is a single zone, CET in winter and CEST in summer, and each listing keeps the offset its organiser published rather than being re-projected), prices to euros with the symbol last, the venue and address separated out, the banner image copied onto our own servers rather than hotlinked from the organiser.

Dates are the one thing the model does not have the final say on: where the organiser's page publishes exact start and end timestamps, those are written over whatever the model produced.

how cities work

The 10 city pages — Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Marseille, Nantes, Lille, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Montpellier, Grenoble — are hackathon ecosystems rather than the 10 largest communes in the country. Grenoble and Montpellier are smaller than Nice, Rennes or Rouen but run far denser hackathon calendars, so they get their own pages while the communes, suburbs, départements and régions around them fold into the closest hub for browsing purposes.

So La Défense, Saclay, Versailles, Saint-Denis, Créteil and Cergy browse under Paris — and so do Reims, Rouen and Orléans, all closer to it than to any other hub; Villeurbanne, Saint-Étienne, Valence and Clermont-Ferrand under Lyon; Blagnac, Labège, Albi, Montauban and Tarbes under Toulouse; Aix-en-Provence, Aubagne, Toulon and Avignon under Marseille; Saint-Herblain, Saint-Nazaire, Angers, Le Mans and Laval under Nantes; Villeneuve-d’Ascq, Roubaix, Lens, Arras, Dunkerque and Amiens under Lille; Mérignac, Pessac, Pau, Bayonne, La Rochelle, Poitiers and Limoges under Bordeaux; Illkirch, Mulhouse, Colmar, Metz and Nancy under Strasbourg; Castelnau-le-Lez, Béziers, Sète, Nîmes and Perpignan under Montpellier; and Meylan, Échirolles, Chambéry, Annecy and Annemasse under Grenoble. An event’s own page always shows its real venue and address — the grouping only affects which city page you find it on, because that reflects how people actually travel to these events.

Grouping stops where travel stops, and it stops more often than the shape of the country suggests. Nice — with Sophia Antipolis, Antibes, Cannes, Valbonne and Grasse behind it — is 200 km from Marseille along one coast road and runs an ecosystem of its own; Rennes is 110 km from Nantes but in a different académie on a different TGV branch, and Brest is 240 km further again; Caen and Le Havre face the Channel rather than the Seine valley that feeds Paris; Tours and Bourges sit in the middle Loire, well past the Orléans belt; Dijon and Besançon are 190 km from Lyon in a région with no hub at all; and Ajaccio and Bastia are on an island. All eleven keep their own names rather than being filed under a hub nobody would travel from, and they appear in the main listings without a city page of their own. Names that belong to more than one place are never guessed either: “Laval” means Laval in the Mayenne, which browses under Nantes, and a listing that says Laval, Québec is left alone; a bare “Saint-Louis” is only resolved once the value carries a département, because it is also a city in Missouri and another in Senegal; and “Bruges” is read as the Belgian city unless the Gironde is named, because that is the overwhelming reading.

who it's for

Three groups, in roughly that order of size:

• People who want to build something. Developers, designers, data people, students and founders looking for something to enter this weekend — in their own city, or online.
• Organisers. Anyone running a hackathon in France who wants it found by those people. Listing is free through the submit form, and the pipeline will often find your event on its own before you get round to submitting it.
• Universities and companies. Engineering schools running a student hackathon, corporate innovation teams programming an internal build weekend, and anyone trying to see what the rest of the French calendar already looks like before picking a date of their own.

Student-run university hackathons, corporate innovation weekends, charity build days and independent game jams are all in scope. The site chrome is in English because that is the working language of most of these events; French place names and organisation names are kept as they are written, accents and all.

how this site makes money, and what that changes

Being listed is free and always will be — the directory would be worthless if it only contained events that paid to be in it. Organisers can optionally pay for a featured listing: a one-off 50 €, which puts a banner for the event across every page of the site for seven days. That is the whole of what the money buys, and the full terms are on the submit page.

It does not buy an email to our subscribers — this edition captures newsletter signups but has no outbound mail provider attached and has never sent a message, so promising a send would be promising something that cannot happen.

A featured listing buys placement and nothing else. It does not change whether an event is listed, and it does not change the order of the ordinary listings, which are sorted by date. We are not affiliated with Eventbrite, Devpost, Luma or Meetup, we are not paid by them, and outbound links to organiser pages are not affiliate links — we earn nothing when you register for an event.

editorial stance

• Completeness over curation. The aim is every French hackathon, not a shortlist of the ones we like. We do not rate, rank or review events.
• Organisers own their description. Descriptions are the organiser's own words; summaries are condensed from them, as described above. We do not add promotional claims of our own.
• Corrections are free and fast. There is no fee to fix or remove a listing, including a featured one.
• No dark patterns. No cookie wall, no third-party analytics, no advertising trackers. See the privacy policy for exactly what is and is not collected.

the rest of the network

Hackathon France is the French edition of a small network of national hackathon directories built on the same pipeline. The others are Hackathons Australia, Canada Hackathons, UK Hackathons, Hackathons USA, Hackathon España, and Hackathon Deutschland. Each one covers its own country only: the filters, the city hubs and the currency are built for that market, so a French event will never turn up on the UK site and vice versa. They are linked in the footer of every page.

who publishes this

Not stated yet, and we are not going to make it up. French law expects a site's publisher to identify itself — the loi pour la confiance dans l’économie numérique (LCEN, loi n° 2004-575 of 21 June 2004), article 6-III — on a page headed Mentions légales naming the éditeur, the directeur de la publication and the host. The operating entity behind Hackathon France is still being settled, so that page does not exist here yet; it will be published, naming the operator, as soon as those details are provided. Everything else on this page — where the listings come from, how they are filtered, how the money works — is already true and checkable today, and the privacy policy says the same thing about who the data controller is.

get in touch

Corrections, questions, removal requests and press enquiries all go to the same place — see the contact page. Organisers with an event to add should use the submit form.