Blogger meeting re:publica
The blogger community in Germany is heterogeneous – with outstanding women.
When discussion turns to data protection in Germany – and it has often been a focus of attention recently – her opinion is in great demand: Constanze Kurz has campaigned for greater Internet security and against spying for a number of years as spokesperson of the Chaos Computer Clubs (CCC). Most recently she initiated a debate on the digitization of the world of work with her book Arbeitsfrei.
Constanze Kurz is one of many women in Germany’s Internet community. That will again become very clear at re:publica, the large gathering of bloggers in Berlin. In recent years almost half of the festival visitors have been women. The organizers expect more than 5,000 shapers of digital culture to attend the eighth meeting, including Internet policymakers, business people and artists.
“I was very bored until 1994”
The latter include Kathrin Passig. The author is a winner of the Bachmann Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for German-language literature. She won the Grimme Online Award for her contribution to the development of the Riesenmaschine blog. Passig is very active on Twitter. She once told the daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel: “I was very, very bored – until pretty precisely the time when the Internet also appeared outside universities, in other words, until 1994.”
Perhaps Anke Domscheit-Berg will also be a guest at re:publica. The entrepreneur is married to Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the former partner of Julian Assange at Wikileaks. Anke Domscheit-Berg is politically active for the Internet-based Pirate Party and mainly campaigns on the subject of open government: how can politics and government be changed to make them more open and more transparent and also offer more opportunities for participation?
For a long time now, the Federal Government has had the Internet on its agenda too – and also assigned a woman an important role: Cornelia Rogall-Grothe is Federal Government Commissioner for Information Technology and Chair of the National Cyber Security Council. “We must seize the opportunities that arise from the potentials of increasing digitization in all areas of life,” she said at the 2014 CeBIT computer fair. At the same time, it is important to guard against the risks that stem from attacks on the Web. “Government faces a very special challenge here as definer of the policy framework.”
