On New Year’s Eve heading into 2026, a few hours before midnight, Gerhard sits at his computer writing the first commits of a new project. Other people are having raclette. He is building a tool for barcamps because, after all these years, he is done puzzling over whether a session card says “mediation” or “meditation”. That is how barcamp.io begins, technically still in 2025.
To understand how it came to that, you have to go back a good twelve years. Barcamp Hamburg, 2013. Gerhard is well connected in the German blogging and social media scene at the time, but conferences? For a long time he considered them something you have to be able to afford. Nobody had told him there was a format where exactly that doesn’t apply. The day sweeps him away: knowledge shared voluntarily, with verve and passion, without anyone forcing anybody. With a master’s degree in knowledge management, he immediately recognizes what he is looking at. Some of the people from back then inspire him to this day.
In 2015 he switches sides, on a whim: football Twitter was big, a barcamp for football topics didn’t exist. So he made one. fubacamp was well received, and the seed was planted. Since then he has carried the format everywhere he works: internal barcamps in companies and projects, for spreading knowledge, for generating it, and for the connections between people that grow almost as a side effect.
In 2025 the side effect became a statement. Lean Kanban Central Europe had last taken place in 2019, leaving a gap in the German-speaking world ever since. Gerhard, an accredited Kanban trainer and organizational development consultant by trade, waited a while for someone to fill it. Then he did it himself: KANBANcamp.
If you are looking for the common thread: it is access. The first barcamp was created as an answer to FooCamp, which only the friends of Tim O’Reilly, a publisher and developer in Silicon Valley, were invited to. That is exactly why Gerhard is attached to the format: low-threshold, open, a counter-model to elitist conferences, built on solidarity in the best sense. He believes that inequality in society must be reduced massively, not least economically, and makes no secret of it: tax the rich. Also, and especially, from his own privileged position.
Which leaves the name. In his early blogging days, Johnny Haeusler aka @spreeblick was one of the defining figures of the German scene. He still is. Gerhard is from Hamburg, lives a few hundred meters from the river Elbe and looks out over the water when he strolls through his neighborhood. @elbblick, the rest fell into place on its own.
Other than that: a blue VW bus until a few months ago, happy when traveling, happy with a camera in hand, far too rarely with time for it. In football his heart beats for HSV, especially the women’s team, and he has nothing against St. Pauli either. Coffee beats tea, except in summer, when ice-cold barley tea or homemade iced tea enters the picture. And he would really like to stream and game more again. Adulthood has other plans.
Sparring
If you are planning your first barcamp or stuck somewhere in the organizing, just drop him a line. He is happy to take the time. That’s how this community works.