An hour ago, re:publica 2015 was officially opened on Stage 1 at the STATION-Berlin. We are happy that the attendees of Europe’s leading Internet conference are just as diverse as the digital society itself – more than 800 speakers on 17 parallel stages will spark the debate with over 6,000 participants. With a total of 450 hours of program, the event is running until Thursday, May 7, 2015.

One part of the re:publica success story is that different communities gather together in one place to talk about our digital present and future, bringing people together who would otherwise rarely meet – bloggers and architects, politicians and hackers, executives and activists, artists and scientists.

The ninth edition of the re:publica in 2015 is taking place under the heading Finding Europe, with the explicit aim of discovering the new within the ‘Old World’. This includes the question of whether there is a single European digital society, whether digital Europe is a distinct cultural space. So the Europe of today and tomorrow is a central topic of many of the scheduled talks and discussions as well.

Besides tracing current net political debates, the program also incorporates important and socially pertinent issues from different European perspectives: Refugees, migration, or the city of the future are as much a topic for the re:publica as the digital domestic market, net neutrality, or privacy. And this year, the re:publica’s ties with the concurrent international MEDIA CONVENTION Berlin are even closer. Not only is the media topic explored across conferences, but the introduction of a joint ticket for both events for the first time this year will further enhance this productive partnership.

Stay tuned over the next three days of the #rp15, with notable speakers like the internet researcher Ethan Zuckerman (MIT), political scholar Ulrike Guérot (European Democracy Lab), internet anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, virtual reality pioneer Nonny de la Peña, Russian journalist and security expert Andrei Soldatov, astronaut Alexander Gerst (ESA), science fiction author and blogger Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing), the vice-president of the German Bundestag, Claudia Roth, architecture researcher Carlo Ratti (MIT), and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.