The Winterkongress ("Winter Congress") is the annual meeting of the Swiss association Digitale Gesellschaft. On the evening of Friday, February 28 and Saturday, March 1, 2025 - hackers, programmers, activists and interested parties will come together for the eighth time at the Casinotheater in Winterthur to discuss topics relating to information technology, networking and its impact on our society.

This is the most important regular event for digital liberties in Switzerland. It is non-commercial and is organised by and for the community. This also includes members of the authorities, academia, politics and media professionals, who exchange ideas with the interested public at the Winter Congress. The event is designed to encourage involvement.

Florin Hasler, Director of Opendata.ch, and Christian Gutknecht will be giving a presentation on the topic of ‘Using open parliamentary data to achieve greater transparency, innovation and participation’.

The programme includes over 30 lectures and workshops divided into four thematic tracks. These range from ‘Digital self-defence’ to ‘Ethics, science, culture & society’, ‘Law & politics’ and ‘Networks, security, hardware & software’. In addition to the thematic focal points, there will be plenty of space for spontaneous dialogue.

Everything will be live-streamed and also discussed online - strong preference for Matrix, Mastodon, and other decentralized networks. The picture above is from the 2021 online edition powered by Workadventure. The code is also linked below and we might just revive the instance ;-)