First Keynote Speaker Announcement!

We are thrilled to announce our first keynote speaker for Berlin Buzzwords 2019! Our co-founder Isabel Drost-Fromm will open the 10th edition and celebrate this special occasion with us.

Isabel works as an Open Source Strategist at Europace AG Germany. She’s a member of the Apache Software Foundation, co-founder of Apache Mahout and has mentored several incubating projects. Isabel is interested in all things FOSS, search and text mining with a decent machine learning background. As well as Berlin Buzzwords, she is also the co-founder of FOSS Backstage, a conference on all things Free and Open Source behind the scenes - including valuable lessons learned for internal software development teams (also known as InnerSource). Isabel spoke to us about the founding days of Berlin Buzzwords for the first episode of our conversation series which you can listen to here. You can also view her profile here

Isabel will talk about Open Source from the founding days of Berlin Buzzwords in 2009 up to the present day, with a focus on the user's perspective and project development at the Apache Software Foundation.

Read what Isabel has to say about her talk below:

"We have won" - that's what I once heard about the trust that is being put into free and open source projects. Looking back at ten years of Berlin Buzzwords, it's hard to imagine how things could be any different: Projects developed at the Apache Software Foundation are basis on which tons of data analytics systems are built. But as a downstream user likely betting their core business on open source - how well do you understand how these projects are being governed, how direction is being set, how well they are equipped to survive the next decade? After all there's more to open source than the source code itself.

The ASF provides a home to several hundred OSS projects - a lot of them relevant to the search, store, scale, stream ecosystem that Berlin Buzzwords targets. If you have been digging a bit deeper, you may have encountered the phrase “The Apache Way” - often used in relation to how projects at the ASF should work.

This talk tries to give a glimpse behind the scenes - with a strong focus on what the implications of best practices advertised at the ASF are for downstream users of its projects: A lot of that has to do with building bridges that cross organisations, time zones, geographies and cultures.