Plain Schwarz / Creator Broker Owner

We are plain schwarz. We organize events for and with open source communities, acting as non-code contributors to open source projects of all kinds. We are here to network with those committed to the goal of an open and free society, based on sustainable knowledge and resources.

We are excited to have four very special guests with us during re:publica.  Follow us on Twitter @plainschwarz for announcements and timings, and join us at booth 3c10 to have a chat with our guests and us.

Isabel Drost-Fromm

Isabel Drost-Fromm is Open Source Strategist at Europace AG Germany. She’s a member of the Apache Software Foundation, co-founder of Apache Mahout and has mentored several incubating projects. Isabel is interested in all things FOSS, search and text mining with a decent machine learning background. True to the nature of people living in Berlin she loves having friends fly in for a brief visit. As a result she co-founded and is still one of the creative heads behind both Berlin Buzzwords, a tech conference on all things search, scale and storage as well as FOSS Backstage, a conference on all things free and open source behind the scenes - including valuable lessons learned for internal software development teams (also known as InnerSource).

We are happy welcome Isabel to our stand to speak about her work with the Apache Software Foundation, how the organisation works, the upcoming ApacheCon conference in Berlin and the importance of open source outside of the realm of software development.

Fabian Hüske

Fabian Hueske is a committer and PMC member of the Apache Flink project and has been contributing to Flink since its earliest days. He has a PhD in computer science from TU Berlin and is a co-founder of data Artisans, a Berlin-based start-up devoted to fostering Flink. Data Artisans was recently acquired by Alibaba and continues to contribute to Apache Flink as Ververica. Fabian speaks at meetups and conferences and frequently blogs about the internals and use cases of Flink. He has organized and held several Flink training sessions and has recently written a book on “Stream Processing with Apache Flink” for O'Reilly.

Philipp Krenn

Philipp lives to demo interesting technology. Having worked as a web, infrastructure, and database engineer for more than ten years, Philipp is now working as a developer advocate at Elastic — the company behind the open source Elastic Stack consisting of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. Based in Vienna, Austria, he is constantly traveling Europe and beyond to discuss open source software, search, databases, infrastructure, and security.

Manuel Friedrich

After finishing his studies in computer science Manuel joined DeTeBerkom, a subsidary of Deutsche Telekom AG and managed national and international research projects for about 10 years. Later on he started working for Technologiestiftung Berlin Innovationsagentur which became part of Berlin Partner für Wirtschaft und Technologie. He is now manager of the ICT, media, and creative industries cluster in the joint innovations strategy of the federal states of Berlin and Brandenburg.