After I visited my first barcamp (#SWEC16) in 2016 I wanted to participate in my first hackathon in 2017. I stumpled upon the Future Mobility Days #FMDNUE in Nuremberg, which offerd a bar camp, a design thinking jam and a hackathon all at once at on place within 36 hours. All in all for 99€ quite a bargain. And a additional motivation to get a new laptop for the hackathon.
Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched.
Of course I missed the early bird priced tickets so I had to pay the full 199€. And then there is this little topic called health. Becoming older is no walk in the park. The days before the event I realised that the conecpt of hacking for 24 hours with little to no sleep was not going to apply to me. Dang!
Nevertheless I was excited to go to this event!
Table of Contents
Coffee First
Barista Bastian Reif was in charge of supplying all the nerds and nerdettes with his special coffee creations. Yummi!
Keynotes
To start the day Benno gave a short talk why his company started this event. To get the party started they invited three speakers which gave some nice Lightning Talks.
Dr. Andreas Knie -a sociologist from Berlin- talked about innovation processes. Main takeaway: innovation has to break rules, sometimes even laws.
Josef Stoll -former CTO of Deutsche Bahn- told us about his visions of future mobility.
A great talk was delivered by Dr. Markus Junginger from MHP. His main point is that companies who concentrate on increasing their efficiency are celebrating the status quo instead of embracing progress and innovation.
Sessions
Some guidelines first:
At a barcamp it is always very hard to decide which sessions to attend. I attended these three:
Delivery 4.0
We discussed issues with inner city delivery and optimizing the last mile. An interesting idea is that cities can prohibit parcel services and provide central hubs from where just one service company delivers all inner city customers. A nice thing I didn’t know about are the boxes for parcels from DHL:
https://www.dhl.de/paketkasten
Ranging from 230€ to 560€ it is an interesting alternative to fetching parcel from the post office.
Securing mobility in rural areas
This session dealt with the challenges of mobility in small towns and villages where public transportation cut back their services over the years.
I learned about new technology for car sharing
http://www.landauto-carsharing.de/
And that sometimes you don’t need technology to solve problems
Autonomous Driving and the impact on land-use planning
The third and last session I attended was about the impact of autonomous driving of infrastructure and workplaces.
For example autonomous driving can be a big competition for public transportation, when the car that drives you you don’t have to own anymore.
Overall Takeaways
One thing I’ve noticed: In comparison to the SWEC16 the percentage of women was much higher at the FMD. Perhaps that’s due to the topic which doesn’t automatically imply talking about software development.
I didn’t know before that the expression Barcamp is the open-to-the-public alternative to Foocamp where FOO stands for “Friends of O’Reilly”. So it comes from the classic computer science foobar terminology.
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