What an eventful week! Legions of people interested in ILIAS, friends of ILIAS, users of ILIAS and developers of ILIAS all heeded the bugle's call and came together, armed with good cheer and curiosity, for the 25th International ILIAS Conference at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg.

The conference took place on the 9th and 10th of September, during which time attendees were able to enjoy exciting presentations, innovative workshops and a variety of interesting 'lightning talks'. What a harmonic exchange it was! [1]

But we weren't restricted to only two wonderful days together... the mobilisation of ILIAS enthusiasts started the day before, which saw the 46th DevConf take place, a day for all those who contribute to ILIAS in whatever shape or form.

In this first report though I'd like to concentrate on those two exciting and frankly lovely conference days. As I couldn't be everywhere at once, I am only touching on the programme points that I was able to take part in. In a second report I will dive a bit deeper into the more technical DevConf. Stay tuned...

This motto for this year's conference was 'With aplomb down the years'. 24 years after the very first mustering of ILIAS enthusiasts, we returned to the place where the very first ILIAS Conference took place, The Helmut Schmidt University / University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg.

It was an honour for us to listen to Prof. Dr. em. Wilfried Hesser as he took us on a journey back to the beginnings of ILIAS at the HSU and told us about the people who contributed to making not only the university the place that it is today, but also to making our software what it is today. This was entertaining, highly interesting and also emotional, as we remember the much-appreciated community members such as Karola Koch, Harry Boldt and Erik Reidt, who have left us during this journey.

Of course, no ILIAS Conference would be complete with the CEO and Product Manage, Matthias Kunkel. On the opening morning of each conference, he gives all of the participants an overview of where the software currently stands. Well... usually. This time he told us about the journey of Odysseus and wove an elegant analogy between ILIAS the software and the Homeric epic (in German, 'The Iliad' is called 'Die Ilias'). Thankfully the journey that our software has taken is a little less full of bronze-tipped spears, unstrung knees and one-eyed gigantic sons of Poseidon.[2] But we have had our share of other monsters that needed to be overcome.

One of the monsters that constantly dogs our heels is the dreaded 'Basispflege' (a sort of chimera made up of technical debt, maintenance, compliance and interoperability). ILIAS is alive with new features and functions, driven forwards by its own users. But who looks after all the existing code and adapts it to current standards? This task is, of course, left to our heroic developers and costs a great deal of time. And as we all know, time is money. Also when it comes to the development of ILIAS.

One of the conference highlights for me personally was the keynote speech by Prof. Roberto Simanowski. He drew connections in his presentation between artificial intelligence and ethics, and in doing so helped me develop an awareness for this topic that I had not previously had to that extent. The following in particular has remained lodged in my mind: if we rely on AI to summarise books and texts for us, we are only getting ONE perspective, namely that of the LLM in question. But every human reads a book differently. We interpret things differently, we attach importance to different aspects and approach these texts with different experiences. Nobody reads a passage of text in the same way that another person does. And also, what hasn't been taken into consideration is that AI is suffused with western values. What happens to all of the cultures that haven't been involved with developing AI?
And what happens to all of the possible interpretations and the resulting associations when a large portion of humanity can only rely on ONE (Western-orientated) summary? We are severely limiting our curiosity, our knowledge, our potential and our culture.

To a certain extent Roberto Simanowski made the case for reading for oneself. For forming one's own opinion and not getting everything pre-chewed and spoon fed. And of course he said so much more.
If I were only allowed to recommend just one presentation from the conference, it would be this one. It really moved me. I have thought about this topic a lot since then and am very grateful for this new perspective.

There was, of course, at lot more fantastic stuff to experience at the conference. I attended fascinating presentations on the topics of AI and design and got a lot of new ideas on how courses could be designed in ILIAS - a topic that plays a large role in my work too.

Especially interesting for me was the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach presented by Richard Powers. In a nutshell, it involves making sure that all users - whatever their restrictions or needs are - can use the materials from the very beginning. This slide from his presentation is a great example that shows clearly what is UDL and what isn't!

The best thing would be for us all to strive to make courses and materials in a way that includes everyone from the very beginning. Just like the designers of the steps in the photo on the right. And let's be honest - don't they look cool?

This year I also played an active role at the conference and together with Tomke Fries and Marcel Domanski came up with a workshop - 'Onboarding for new community members'. In this workshop we explained how the Society is structured, how the development process takes place and how the participants could take part with as few hurdles in the way as possible.

We were truly overwhelmed by the number of participants. The room was full! We hadn't expected that at all! We had planned for five participants... oh boy were we wrong!
We were able to gather useful feedback for our onboarding initiative and by the end had received such a wide range of different ideas and suggestions that we returned home with a genuine endorphin rush! Thank you! Take a look at our onboarding page - if you want, you can use it for your own institution. We'll be adding a lot more to it in the coming months. I will report on this again.

The first evening was the evening of the social event... and wow - that was a tasty buffet. The candy bar especially did it for me! It was the little details that just made the evening perfect. Even the cocktail names were perfect - I mean, who doesn't want to drink an alcohol-free SrMembership or a (deceptively strong) SrLifeCycleManager? I for one found them both very tasty!

Later that evening there was a little surprise. Two ILIAS-branded cars were auctioned off! Ok ok.... 'cars' is a bit overdoing it... they were actually two little custom-designed Bobby Cars, in ILIAS blue, proudly bearing the ILIAS logo.

The two winning bidders were delighted about their new ILIAS-mobiles. 'ILIAS 1' found a new home in Riga whereas 'ILIAS 2' will be making Graz just a bit cooler. Vroom vroom!

(Editor's note: the auction was basically a gag and came about spontaneously - the profits are going to the Society as a donation and will therefore end up flowing into the development of ILIAS. Great idea Bettina!)

The conference ended on Thursday afternoon with announcement of the winner of this year's Community Award. Michael Jansen was awarded the attractive cube for his constant commitment to not only the development of ILIAS, but also to the community and beyond. Thank you Michael and congratulations!

So... this is the point at which you would normally expect an 'and we will see each other next year at location x'…
But no... (sound of crickets chirping)... we don't yet have a host for the 26th ILIAS Conference.

And now? What remains after such a harmonic, intensive and fascinating conference? Well mainly, a whole heap of motivational energy to get on with the next projects! And ideas. And inspiration. And a really warm glow of happiness.
At least that's how I feel. And I think it is probably safe to say that I am not the only one who feels that way.

Thank you all for having taken part and having made such a lovely time of these days in Hamburg.