Berlin Buzzwords team

Berlin Buzzwords opens its doors next Monday at 8:00am. As you may know, the conference is being organised by Simon Willnauer, Jan Lehnardt, Isabel Drost and newthinking communications. We would like to use this opportunity to publish some pictures and background information on the people behind Berlin Buzzwords - a hug to everyone involved: Without you this event would never be possible.

If you have any questions or problems during the conference, don't hesitate to grab one of the following guys for help.

Responsible for the content and community connection of Berlin Buzzwords

Isabel Drost is member of the Apache Software Foundation. She is organiser of the Apache Hadoop Get Together in Berlin, was co-organiser of the first European NoSQL meetup as well as the Berlin Buzzwords conference. She co-founded Apache Mahout and is active Apache Mahout committer. Isabel is actively engaged with communities of various Apache projects, e.g. Apache Lucene and Apache Hadoop. She is regular speaker at renown conferences on topics related to free software development, scalability, Apache Lucene, Apache Hadoop and Apache Mahout.

Simon is a Lucene core committer and PMC member. During the last couple of years he worked on design and implementation of scalable software systems and search infrastructure. He studied Computer Science at the University of Applied Sciene Berlin. Currently, he work as a consultant for Apache Solr, Lucene Java and Hadoop and is a co-organizer of the "BerlinBuzzwords" conference on Scalability June 2011 in Berlin (Germany).

Jan Lehnardt is CouchDB's chief evangelist and a director of CouchDB Ltd. where he consults for major industry players. Jan has spoken about CouchDB at conferences such as O'Reilly's OSCON and Qcon, as well as groups like the BBC's web development. Jan made sure to include lots of interesting NoSQL talks in the Berlin Buzzwords schedule.

Responsible for organisation and administration

Berlin Buzzwords would not be possible without the helping hands ensuring that the conference runs as smooth as it does. Following we have listed a sub set of those people who remain mostly in the background booking hotel rooms, handling registration, talking to the press, taking care of sponsors, setting up the on-site WiFi.

Julia Gemählich is working fulltime as a project manager for newthinking communications GmbH in Berlin and is on the verge of finishing her "Bachelor Professional of Event Organisation (CCI)".

During Berlin Buzzwords she will be responsible for coordination and organisation. Should you have any questions concerning the conference, the evening event or general questions feel free to contact her.

Elisa Schulze is an eventmanger and working for newthinking communications GmbH in Berlin.

She will be responsible for accreditation and attendee information at the infocounter during Berlin Buzzwords. In the evening Elisa spend her time at school to get the general qualification for university entrance.

Ulf Kypke-Burchardi is responsible for network connectivity at the conference location. If WiFi does not work for you, he is the guy to talk to. In addition he is the guy who took care of getting the Berlin Buzzwords BBQ setup at c-base.

Sylvia Tomala works at newthinking communications amongst others as travel manager. During Berlin Buzzwords she is responsible for speaker support, accommodation and travel.

Pia Kohn works for newthinking communications since March. For the Berlin Buzzwords conference she is in charge of all issues concerning sponsoring.

Max Koop works for newthinking communications as well. For Berlin Buzzwords he is responsible for handling ticketing via Amiando, community interaction via our Twitter account @berlinbuzzwords. He is supporting the Berlin Buzzwords Barcamp as organiser.

Philip Kaden is our Photoenthuisast documenting the Berlin Buzzwords conference. Being our official photographer you'll see him at Urania as well as at the BBQ at c-base with his camera. Images are going to be posted after the conference and linked to from the official conference web page.

Martin Schmidt is independent event manager in Berlin. He's working as researcher in the field of cultural studies at Universität Potsdam. In his free time he likes mountains and podcasting. At Berlin Buzzwords Martin is responsible for recording the presentations. Videos are going to be posted online and made available for free one by one after the conference.

Other

There are many other helping hands that facilitate Berlin Buzzwords: Thanks to Clemens Lerche, who was responsible for sponsorship handling and partner package sizing. Thanks to Martin Gerlach and Sebastian Schelter for helping with conference setup and tear down. Thanks to our session chairs Thomas Bodner, Phuc Ha, Fabian Blechschmidt, Max Heimel, Markus Kramer and Toni Grütze as well as to our hostess Rike Lutter. Thank you also to everyone at Urania helping make this event successful.

Responsible for the Barcamp on Sunday evening before Buzzwords

If you arrive on Sunday evening you hopefully registered to take part in the Barcamp Berlin Buzzwords in newthinking store on Sunday evening. The Barcamp is co-organised by Nick Burch:

Nick is passionate about open source and open development, and has been involved with the Apache Software Foundation since 2003. Nick is chair of the Apache POI project, and as a member of the ASF helps out with mentoring of new projects, and with community development. When not coding, Nick can often be found helping to run and speak at BarCamps, Geek Nights and technology conferences.

Responsible for the Workshops and Hackathons after Berlin Buzzwords

To get people to stay in town longer we have asked several active committers and contributors to various projects to help us organise Hackathons and Workshops as well as local companies and universities to host them. We'd like to use this space to say thank you to them as well.

Berlin Buzzwords is starting with a Movie Hackathon on Saturday/Sunday before the conference. Thank you to Till Plumbaum, Alain Said from DAI TU Berlin as well as to @jannis from Movie Pilot for doing the heavy lifting of organising this event.

On Wed/Thu/Fri we will have a huge list of community organised Hackathons and Workshops. Thank you goes to

• Olivier Grisel and Doris Maaßen for organising as well as to Neofonie GmbH for hosting the Semantic Hackathon.
• Matthias Wessendorf and Eberhard Wolff for organising as well as Adesso for hosting the Messaging Workshop.
• Lars George for organising as well as Groupon for hosting the HBase Hackathon.
• Stephan Ewen, Fabian Hüske and Geerd Dietger Hoffmann for organising as well as the research group DIMA at TU Berlin for hosting the Stratosphere Hackathon.
• Emmanuel Marchal for organising as well as Soundcloud for hosting the Cassandra Workshop.
• Oliver Fischer for organising as well as Nokia Gate5 GmbH for hosting the Apace Hadoop Hackathon.
• Ryan Betts for organising and Betahaus for hosting the VoltDB Hackathon

Thank you to all of you for helping us make Berlin Buzzwords more interesting by adding space and time for attendees to get an in-depth view of individual projects discussed during the main conference.

Responsible for trainings

A final Thank You goes to JTeam and Cloudera for providing trainings to Berlin Buzzwords attendees on subjects relevant to the conference.