The Lectures at 40C3 are structured in various track (subject areas). Each track is looked after by a team consisting of experts in the relevant field. Please chose a applicable track for your proposal.

As in previous years, we are launching multiple Calls for Participation at once. In addition to the Call for Presentation on the main stages, we also invite you to submit your proposals at our Call for Performances at the Music Club and the Chill Floor, to respond to our Call for Punk issued by our Späti and our Art coordination team’s Call for Art, asking you to hand in your installations at and around the Hamburg Messe).

Dates & deadlines for main stages

• Deadline for submissions: 9 October 2026 (23:59 UTC +1)
• Notification of acceptance: 3 November 2026
• 40th Chaos Communication Congress: 27 – 30 Dezember 2026

Art, Culture and Beauty

Model citizens should behave: be measurable, predictable, optimizable, corruptible--and best of all, they should also save democracy. The track Art, Culture and Beauty is interested in all those who want to find the cracks in the common model. We are looking for lectures, lecture performances and reports on artistic works and research that show the body as training data, as a catwalk, as a score, or that lock themselves exactly against it. That tell what rituals, practices, and systems arise when communities escape their modelling or appropriate it. Make unheard-of future models or dismantle monitoring systems and cut a good figure in the process.

Please submit your own contributions and - more importantly - convince and support your favourite artists, curators or critics to present their work and the ideas behind it at the Congress 2026. Thank you!

PS: All full-fledged performances, DJ sets, Krrrk-bsss-fiep concerts, baroque operas etc. please apply to the Call for Music/Punk/Art linked at the top. We only do the things that can be realized in the lecture program of the 40C3.

Chaos Community Creations

The track Chaos Community Creations is back and of course the community is in focus once again!

Hackers have never been particularly good model citizens. We don't read manuals, we rewrite them. We don't ask what a system should do, we ask what else it might be capable of. And that's exactly what makes us, in a world that is increasingly optimised for conformity and predictability, a strange anachronism or the most important counterculture that exists right now.

Show us how you forge your reality: Present projects that show spine, report on extraordinary collaborations that no one saw coming, introduce events that may never have happened before. What moved you or what did you move in the chaos bubble? Share it with us and other Model Chaos Citizens, submit it to the CCC Track! By the community, for the community.

Entertainment

Whether it's a game show, gala, glitch battle or singing contest: We want to laugh, get excited and feel amazed together when the curtain rises. That’s why we’re looking for formats — big and small — that combine humour and seriousness at 40C3, and that will keep the popcorn warm and the mate cold.

So slip on your glitter hoodie and submit your ideas in the Entertainment track, whether it's a well-established entertainment format or a brand new idea. Don't forget to tell us what you need to bring your plans to the stage. Also, please specify how much time you will need – for an evening show, this could be more than 60 minutes!

Ethics, Society & Politics

The Ethics, Society & Politics track is seeking visions, analyses, and concrete actions.

Citizenship has become an increasingly restrictive category; we are now living in a world where tech empires rule, track, surveil and manipulate; and "Are you human?" has become an actual question rather than a running gag. Under the motto "Model Citizens", we call for presentations that break with the concept and explore what lies beyond both models and citizenship.

The collection, processing, and exploitation of data are moving a surveilled society to a repressive society. We now need to unlearn what hasn't worked in the past, practice new tactics and develop new visions. How do we build systems that allow autonomy instead of determining behavior? How do we fight excessive surveillance infrastructure? How do we act with true solidarity in increasingly hostile environments?

Join us to discuss and present brave ideas that help all of us remain autonomous, curious, and harder to classify. Let's figure out together how we can disobey and build systems that cater us, not them.

Hardware

The track Hardware is all about the development and creative use of things that allow the digital to make an impression on the physical.

On the one hand our focus is on the whole process from architecture, planning, creation and debugging of everything from textiles, musical instruments, robots, integrated circuits, means of transportation for people and Club Mate, launching stuff into space, alternative energy supplies to medical tools, toys and smartphones — all things hands-on.

On the other hand we are also interested in unintended use cases. So please tell us your stories about expansion or repair of technology and about liberation of proprietary systems—from decapped smart-cards over firmware of your coffee machine to modified agricultural machinery (please tell us early if you want to bring one).

Science

Things used to be a lot funnier. But still – or maybe precisely because of that – we need research and its stories. We need hope, we need knowledge, we need that moment when everything clicks. That’s why we’re asking you to submit your talks: the most exciting, surprising, funny, beautiful, or extraordinary presentations about research, from science, and from researchers of every kind.

Together with you, we want to dive into niches, turn over stones, understand models, and delight in the diversity of research topics. Show us your science-based answers to big and small problems, show us findings you never expected, and answer questions we didn’t even know we had. We want to see your talk in the Science Track and explicitly invite those to submit who otherwise see themselves underrepresented on stages.

Security & Hacking

The security track showcases the influence of IT security aspects on users, machines and society, exploring and challenging the technical boundaries of our freedom.

We welcome technical submissions covering hardware or software.

Do you want to share your discoveries with thousands of fellow security enthusiasts? Have you developed new solutions to previously unsolved problems, or uncovered new challenges we knew nothing about? Have you found ways to bypass rules, control and trust?

We invite you to present them.

This includes topics from mathematics, networks, operating systems, web technologies, memory (mis)management, cryptography, programming languages, hardware design and other fields.

Submission guidelines

Please send us a description of your suggested talk that is as complete as possible. The description is the main criterium for acceptance or rejection, so please ensure that it is as clear and complete as possible. Quality comes before quantity. Due to the non-commercial nature of the event, presentations which aim to market or promote commercial products or entities will be rejected without consideration.

Since most participants find (or don’t find) a lecture by its title, it’s important to keep it precise, accessible and comprehensible. Our teams will keep a keen eye on title and subtitle and make suggestions to change them if necessary, so please avoid insider jokes and stereotypes. It would be a shame if we would have to reject an otherwise excellent submission because the title does not tell much about the actual content.

As it is likely that there will be multiple submissions on the same topic, please show us exactly why your talk should be part of the conference. Remember that the teams are diversely staffed, and not every reviewer knows every submitter and their background. Please write something about yourself, your research, and your motivation. It does not matter if the talk has been held at another conference somewhere on this planet, as long as it is up to date and relevant.

All talks get, by default, a 60 minutes slot on our stages. You don't need to fill up the whole hour, though. But please note that we love to give the audience a chance for questions and answers after your presentation. Longer slots are possible if absolutely necessary, but should be an exception. Please take our limited amount of presentation time into consideration, check how much time you really need to bring home your points and then tell us the proposed length of your talk.

Travel, costs & visa

The Chaos Communication Congress is a non-commercial event where neither the organisers nor the speakers are being paid. As an accepted speaker for a full talk, you get free admission, though. If necessary, we are able to provide limited support for travel costs. If you need help applying for a visa, such as an official invitation to present to the German embassy, please make sure to let the content team know well in advance. Please be aware that the visa application procedure may take up to six weeks.

Submissions close on 2026-10-09 23:59 (Europe/Berlin), 4 weeks from now.