This year’s LinuxTag closed it’s doors exactly two month ago. Time for the core team to get together and reflect the second of five years in Berlin.

It has become a tradition that this meeting takes place at Linuxhotel, a gorgeous hotel in a private park situated half way between Essen and Bochum. For those who do not know Linuxhotel: during the week there are trainings on free and open source products and during weekends the hotel is open for these projects to meet and get some work done. I wish to express my gratitude to the whole Linuxhotel crew for inviting LinuxTag every year. Furthermore I would like to thank Reinhard for creating such an inspiring place dedicated to free software and open source.

The weekend started with a retrospective round so everyone got the chance to bring out the things he liked and disliked most at LinuxTag 2008. This filled the whole Friday evening and I must say that most of us have been very critical with our selves. In my opinion we did many things much better this year but we have a long way to go. I do not wish to emphasise concrete issues, instead I would like to emphasis   that free software has grown up and got more professional. But for all that the people behind this stayed the same, got more support by new project members and probably moved forward to new projects.

I think the same counts for LinuxTag: it has got much more professional not only with its relocation to Berlin. Simultaneously to the professionalization we have to create a much more relaxed spirit and add many more fun events to our conference. Fortunately we did this year some good first initial steps in this direction by having guided city-tours, the developer-lounge, the Mom-and-Pop grocery store and the projects’ lunch. Whilst our barbecue we have had several new ideas like  a warm up party, a soccer-cup in Messe Berlin’s Sommergarten or a badminton tournament in one of the empty exhibition halls. We also would like to have every evening a supporting programme. This year we have had LinuxNacht and Antigone 2.0 - a quite interesting play. So there are still two evenings free. If you have a good idea and would like to join us, get in touch! This brings me to the next point: even our core team got many new members for the crew and free projects teams, the conference team is lacking fresh blood. I would really like to see a fresh conference team with two new conference chairs breaking new grounds. Of course these guys would need the support from the former chairs but maybe the time has come for a generation change. If you are interested in participating in the organization of LinuxTag, please drop me a few lines. LinuxTag is organized like an free software project, meaning after meeting some initial requirements you can participate in any internal project.

Nevertheless I am strongly convinced that next LinuxTag will be a success. It will be our third event in Berlin, the cooperation with Messe Berlin works out for my ressort very well and we have never started organizing the upcoming event this early. So my team hopefully will have much more time for additional fun stuff to serve you a magnificent fifteenth LinuxTag on June, 24th-27th 2009 in Berlin!