Finding Europe – Europe visiting the re:publica 2015
Thank you, you were such a wonderful, interested, open-minded and wild audience! This year, we have to admit, the re:publica outdid itself. Instead of the initially expected 450 speakers from 45 countries and a program of 300 hours, a total of 850 international speakers from 60 countries made up the 500 hour-long program. This is the highest number of speakers so far, making 2015 a record-setting year for re:publica. Young and old alike were represented on re:publica's 17 stages – from the youngest speaker of 11 years to the renowned Zygmunt Bauman aged 89.
From Iceland to South Africa, from the US to Singapore – the re:publica 2015 brought together people from all continents. From 5th till 7th May 2015, 7000 participants and around 700 accredited international journalists bustled around the fully packed STATION-Berlin – a festival of superlatives!
More Facts!
We offered 50 sessions on this year's motto Finding Europe. 197 digital spaces from all over the European continent came to Berlin for the event. And we would like to disclose more numbers of the biggest European societal conference: The sessions were not only broadcast on stage but also via wireless as a live stream to over 9000 devices of our guests. The data traffic in and around the STATION-Berlin amounted to about 6 terabytes with a peak value of 700MBit/s. The successful implementation of the conference would not have been possible without the aid of close to 500 helpers. And don't forget to mention the 14,000 litres of beer that were served!
You want more facts? At re:publica 2015 there was the first speaker in a blue jumpsuit. The number of spontaneously set-up wheelchair ramps: 1. 2015 was also the first time that we had to ban somebody from the STATION-Berlin.
This year's conference program's highlights were, amongst others, speeches from Gunter Dueck, Ulrike Guérot, Ethan Zuckermann, Tricia Wang, Claudia Roth, Carlo Ratti, Jillian York and of course von Alexander Gerst and Zygmunt Baumann.
The Maker Space of the Global Innovation Gathering (GIG) was extremely popular. Here, visitors who were interested could exchange ideas with innovators from all over the world and were encouraged to build a 3D printer from electronic scrap, for instance, or a simple mobile charger.
On May 5th and 6th, the MEDIA CONVENTION Berlin gathered a diverse group of people such as Netflix founder Reed Hastings, Lutz Marmor, Director at ARD, political media activists Pussy Riot, YouTube star LeFloid, Christoph Keese, Managing Director at Springer, blogger Stefan Niggemeier, Brigitte Zypries, Secretary of State, investigative journalist Günter Wallraff, and actress Meret Becker.
photo credit: re:publica/Jan Zappner (CC BY-SA 2.0)