On New Year’s Eve, most people have raclette. Gerhard spends the last hours of the year at his computer instead, writing the first lines of code for a new project. The reason: after years and dozens of barcamps, he has had enough of far too often failing to decipher whether a handwritten post-it says “mediation” or “meditation”. barcamp.io goes live in 2025, one minute before midnight.
To understand what drives him, you have to go back a good twelve years. Barcamp Hamburg, 2013. Gerhard is reasonably well connected in the German blogging and social media scene, 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. Or he wasn’t listening. The day sweeps him away: knowledge shared voluntarily, with verve and passion, without anyone forcing people to do it. With a master’s degree in knowledge management, he immediately recognizes what a gold mine he has in front of him, in knowledge terms, not monetary ones.
In 2015 he switches sides, on a whim: football Twitter is big, a barcamp for football topics doesn’t exist. So he organizes one. fubacamp is well received, and the seed is 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 sideline becomes 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 developer by trade, waited a while for someone to fill it. Then he did it himself and launched KANBANcamp.
If you are looking for the common thread: it is low-threshold 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. The same idea is what fascinates Gerhard about the format: accessible to everyone, open, a counter-model to elitist conferences, at its core built on solidarity in the best sense.
That fits Gerhard’s worldview: he believes inequality in society must be reduced massively, and makes no secret of it. Equal rights and equal opportunities. In his view, the biggest key to that lies not necessarily in money but in knowledge. Real knowledge. Facts instead of opinion.
And of course in the end of capitalism: “Tax the rich.”
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.