CloudWave was happy to be part of the 2015 NetFutures conference held in The Egg, Brussels. NetFutures, which was being held for the first time this year and which is the spiritual successor of the Future Internet Assembly (FIA) conferences of years past, was a vibrant networking and innovation conference. With more than 1000 participants, hailing from startups, established companies, government bodies, and academia, NetFutures 2015 was the largest European conference of its kind. This was also reflected in high-profile keynote speakers and talks, spearheaded by Guenther Oettinger, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society.
For CloudWave, the Software & Services Cloud concertation meeting, held right at the beginning of NetFutures, was of particular relevance. The concertation meeting was brilliantly hosted by CloudWatch’s (http://www.cloudwatchhub.eu) Silvana Muscella, and combined keynote talks with panels and introductions of just-starting H2020 projects from the cloud and software engineering domains. Core take-away messages of the meeting include that cross-project collaboration needs to be fostered, and that the remaining FP7 and starting H2020 projects will need to be more proactive in communicating their contributions to potential customers. Specifically, projects will need to get better in communicating with non-technical people - an often-heard catchphrase in this context was “Explain it like you are talking to your grandmother”.
On a lighter note, the One-Minute-Madness session of the concertation meeting, during which each newly-starting H2020 proposal could present their project idea in one minute, as crazily as possible, was jam-packed with fun. Pearse O’Donohue, Head of Unit for Cloud Policy, Software and Services, summarized it best via Twitter:
#netfutures15 one minute madness winners (IMO) 1. Thomas Fahringer rapping 2. Erkuden Rios couch hopping 3. Cedric Thomas onstage DIYing
— Pearse O'Donohue (@PODcloudEU) March 25, 2015
Philipp Leitner, University of Zurich