From Sep 25-30, 2023, Karakun participated in the DiWoDo (Digitale Woche Dortmund) for the third year. With this brief report, we want to share our impressions of this week full of events and talks.

DiWoDo what?

Agreed, you might not be familiar with this one-week event if you are not from Dortmund or work for a company with offices in the European Capital of Innovation 2021.

The DiWoDo is an initiative of the Economic Development Agency Dortmund. Kicked off in 2017, the #diwodo offers a platform for companies and organizations to present their innovations and share their expertise in digitalization in self-organized events. In 2023, about 100 companies actively contributed to the event with a broad range of presentations and events about various aspects of digitization. Participants could choose from topics from IT Security to Artificial Intelligence, methodologies, and so on.

While every company had to provide locations to meet in the past, DiWoDo 2023 in addition offered centralized locations for the events - changing every day of the week. The community met e.g. at the Technologie-Zentrum Dortmund, the city center and the area around the famous Signal-Iduna-Park (home of Borussia Dortmund) or the recently rearranged port of Dortmund - a place where technology and digitalization are evolving.

Karakun contributions: security, automation and methodology

This year, Karakun experts shared their expertise with the following three talks:

Was Dein Browser über Dich verrät - 2023 Edition

We started on Tuesday with a talk about information exposure through browsers by our colleague François Martin. He already presented this topic last year and hit a nerve. Thus, we felt the urge to release it in an updated version.

Participants learned about the information we all reveal by just browsing the web, being tracked and leaving fingerprints as we do so. François explained with which techniques this is done and how we can consciously raise our understanding of the actions we take.

If you are interested in this topic or missed his talk, you can watch it here (German language):

Der Dokumentenversteher: inhaltsbasierte Workflows automatisieren

On Wednesday, Holger Keibel introduced us to the world of content-based automation of workflows. In his presentation, he talked about data exchange in B2B environments, real-world issues when data needs to be processed and why PDF files are often not machine-readable. He then showed the participants how to extract data from tables and why this is important for automation.

Do you want to profit from the high potential of increasing efficiency by automating content-based workflows? Watch the recording of his talk as well (German language):

Since our portfolio is not just bound to purely technical topics, we shared our expertise in methodology on Thursday.

„SCRUM & UX: Koch dir dein agiles Genussmenü“

In our third and final talk, Cindy Hürlimann and I (Claudine) described the approach to combine the Scrum development process with the UX design process.

As we face that challenge in our everyday business, we thought of an analogy of cooking, combining recipes that are similar but needing some alignment to be a perfect match. We share the road to finding a way of collaboration within the Scrum process, thus giving designers the chance to stay creative within their ways of working while still becoming an integral part of the Scrum team. This way is empowered by the emphasis on communication (and alignment) and by a convenient cheat sheet to support keeping track of alignments that matter.

Watch the recording of the talk (German language):

The slides and cheatsheet can be downloaded here.

For more Karakun talks on Software Development and related topics visit our YouTube channel.

An every-year highlight: the sol.IT award

Along with all the valuable sessions we attended, this year’s awarding ceremony of the sol.IT awards was one of our highlights. As one of the finalists of the sol.IT Award 2022 (side note: we won 2nd place with our product PID Cockpit), we couldn’t resist joining the party. Seeing the latest products and ideas of Dortmund’s local tech companies and connecting with them was a lot of fun.

With that, the DiWoDo came to an end for this year. We are already thrilled to continue adding our colours in Dortmund in 2024.