Dear community,
It is my pleasure to announce that we are co-organizing a community event!
It is the Smart Living Forum Solingen, which is a full day around smart home and smart cities with a special focus on Open Source. We are therefore present as the openHAB Foundation and are very happy to also have the communities from ioBroker and OpenRemote on-board, which will be a fantastic opportunity to exchange ideas, learn about solutions and problems the others are busy with and simply to chat about technical stuff and to get to know each other better.
The event takes place on Saturday, November 18 in Solingen, Germany from 10am-18pm. It is open to the general public and will have a marketplace with booths (including @hmerk’s fabulous openHAB demo suitcase 
) and a series of talks. At the same time, we have a separate room for the openHAB community to meet, in case we want to do some ad-hoc sessions, need a quiet place for discussions, etc.
Here is the agenda of the event:
Opening
| 10:00 | Opening of the event |
| 10:20 | Technical opening by openHAB and Solingen.digital |
Community presentations
| 11:00 | Presentation of the open source project ioBroker |
| 11:30 | Presentation of the open source project OpenRemote |
| 12:00 | Presentation of the open source project openHAB |
Technical presentations
| 14:00 | City of Amsterdam: realizing the energy system of the future (Hugo Niesing, City of Amsterdam) |
| 14:45 | SmartCity technology in the Humboldtgymnasium for energy efficiency in the classroom (Stuttgart University of Technology) |
| 15:30 | Safety of PV systems even in snowy regions with K2 Buddy (Nadine Wade, Stefan Köhl, K2 Systems) |
| 16:15 | Smart cities across Europe: from lighting, trees and ships to energy and mobility (Pierre Kil, OpenRemote) |
Wrap-up
| 17:00 | Panel discussion: “What opportunities does Smart City offer for Smart Home?” |
If you want to stay for the evening in Solingen, there will be a Meet&Greet pizza event at 7:30pm, where only open source community members from the three respective projects are allowed in. It will be a nice atmosphere to discuss even more topics with the other developers over a beer or a glass of wine. If you want to join it, please register here for free (but to support our planning, PLEASE only register, if you are really planning to turn up.).
And this isn’t all yet - for all the hard-core developers among us, a hackathon will take place the day after, i.e. on Sunday, November 19. Solingen provides access to smart home devices and smart city data and the participants are accompanied by a professional team through ideation, implementation and presentation phases. There will be prices for the winners and it will be a lot of fun! Everyone interested is invited to register for the hackathon here.
I’m very much looking forward to seeing many of you in Solingen in November! Feel free to leave us feedback or ideas or just the info that you’ll join on this topic.