Dr. Martin Hagen

State Councilor Budget, Personnel and IT Senator for Finance Bremen

Dr. Martin Hagen studied political science and German language and literature in Hamburg and Illinois, U.S.A., and received his doctorate in computer science from Bremen University in 2001. He then began working for the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen at the Senator for Finance in the area of IT and digitization and has been State Councilor for Budget, Personnel and Digitization in the Finance Department since August 01, 2020. He is a member of several supervisory and administrative boards, including Dataport and Bremer Straßenbahn AG.

Andreas Reckert-Lodde

Head of ZenDiS BMI

Andreas Reckert-Lodde is head of the project group ZenDiS “Zentrum für Digitale Souveränität der öffentlichen Verwaltung” (Center for Digital Sovereignty of Public Administration) in the DG II 2 department of the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Homeland.

Mathias Waack

Department of Organization and IT City of Schwäbisch Hall

Mathias Waack has been Head of the Organization & IT department of the City of Schwäbisch Hall since 2020, where he is responsible for the sustainable development of the department and the realignment of the IT infrastructure.

Oliver Bouwer

Speaker IT Senator for Children and Education Bremen

Oliver Bouwer is a consultant for media and education in the digital world at the Senator for Children and Education Bremen. At the interface of IT and pedagogy, he is responsible for the learning platform itslearning, digital content, and is a companion and advisor to Bremen’s schools when it comes to digital school development.

Marie Aurich

Product Manager Education Univention

Marie Aurich joined Univention in May 2022 as product manager and is responsible for the further development of the open source identity management system UCS@school.

Dr. Ralf Resch

Managing Director VITAKO

Ralf Resch has been working on municipal issues and services of general interest for more than 20 years. After studying administrative science at the University of Constance and working in local transport in Leipzig and Berlin, he represented the interests of public employers and services of general interest in Brussels for three years as Secretary General of CEEP (European Confederation of Public Employers and Enterprises). Subsequently, Resch headed the transport department at ADAC e.V. in Munich. Most recently, he was responsible for marketing and public affairs at an IT system manufacturer for local transport. Since January 1, 2017, Dr. Ralf Resch has been Managing Director at Vitako – the Federal Association of Municipal IT Service Providers.

Sönke Schwardt-Krummrich

Teamlead UCS@school Univention

Sönke Schwardt-Krummrich worked as an Open Source Software Engineer at Univention from 2006 to 2022 and drove the development of UCS and UCS@school. In 2022, he moved fully into the role of Team Lead and now coordinates the fortunes of the UCS@school team.

Andreas Gauger

CEO Open-Xchange

OX’s CEO Andreas Gauger has been heavily involved in shaping the cloud and hosting market in Germany since the 1990s.

He founded his first software company when he was still at school and, in 1995, was co-founder of the German hosting pioneer Schlund+Partner. From 2000 to 2008, as the board spokesperson, Gauger drove forward the growth of 1&1 to become both the European market leader in hosting and a leading German ISP and telecommunications provider.

In 2010, he co-founded the internationally successful cloud provider ProfitBricks, of which he was CEO until 2016. Since then, he has been supporting investment companies as a consultant in the SaaS environment.

Farina Steinert

Head of Department Digital School Travekom

Farina Steinert heads the Digital School department at TraveKom, a wholly owned subsidiary of Stadtwerke Lübeck. The department provides comprehensive IT services in the education sector for the Hanseatic City of Lübeck and other municipalities. Farina was previously head of the Solutions Education department at Dataport AöR, where services for the school portals of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein were the responsibility. She spent 16 years building and sustainably implementing platforms for online teaching and learning for university associations in northern Germany. She was in charge of designing the cross-university learning environment www.futureskills-sh.de, where students can acquire skills in artificial intelligence regardless of their course of study.

Tobias Stahl

Head of School IT Hanseatic City of Lübeck

Tobias Stahl started his career in the IT industry with a bachelor’s degree in media informatics from the Technical University of Lübeck. Initially, he worked for 10 years as a product and key account manager in an IT system house, before he first took over the IT administration and now the area management of the school IT of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck 4 years ago.