Search Meetups in Germany

I enjoy going to user group events. Not only because of the talks that are an integral part of most meetups but also to meet and chat with likeminded people.

Fortunately there are some user groups in Germany that are focused on search technology, a topic I am especially interested in. This post lists those I know, if there is one I missed let me know in the comments. For reasons of suspense I am listing the groups from east to west.

Elasticsearch User Group Berlin

Berlin has the luxury of a usergroup dedicated to Elasticsearch only. The group is organized by people of Trifork who are seasoned event organizers. The group seems to have a surprising success with regular meetings and up to 50 participants. This is probably caused by the high startup density in Berlin, the ease of use and scalability of Elasticsearch makes it very popular among them.

Search Meetup Munich

Search Meetup Munich is a very active group organized by Alexander Reelsen of Elasticsearch. There are bimonthly meetings at alternating companies with 2 to 3 talks per event. Topics are open source search in general with a strong emphasis on Lucene, Solr and Elasticsearch. Most speakers will give the talk in English if there are people in the audience who don't speak German. The amount of participants ranges from 20 - 40 people. I am surprised about the vital community in Munich with a lot of startups doing interesting things with search. Though it is quite a way from Karlsruhe to Munich I try to attend the meetings as often as I can.

Solr Lucene User Group Deutschland e.V.

Though the name implies it's a national group Solr Lucene User Group Deutschland e.V. is located in Augsburg. It seems to be mainly organized by members of SHI GmbH, a prominent Lucidworks and Elasticsearch partner. The meetup page is rather quite so far with one event last year with one participant.

Search Meetup Frankfurt

The first search meetup I attended with around 10 participants, a talk on the indexing pipeline of the Solr based product search solution Searchperience and some discussions. There are quite some people with non-Java background doing PHP web development. Unfortunately the 2012 event I attended seems to be the last event that happened. I don't take that personally.

Search Meetup Karlsruhe

Last but not least: As I probably can't travel to Munich all the time and I would like to have some exchange with locals I just started Search Meetup Karlsruhe together with Exensio, long time Solr users and Elasticsearch partners. I don't expect it to be as huge as Munich or Berlin but I hope we can start some interesting discussions.

We just scheduled our first meeting with two talks on Linked Data Search and the difference between building applications based on databases vs. search engines. If you are in the area and interested in search you should join us.

elasticsearch.Stuttgart (Update 16.02.2014)

Just a day after publishing this post another Elasticsearch Meetup was announced, this time in Stuttgart. The first event is scheduled for March 25 with an Elasticsearch 1.0 release party including a talk by Alexander Reelsen. If this didn't clash with JavaLand conference I would definitively go there but I hope there will be more events in the future I can attend.

About Florian Hopf

I am working as a freelance software developer and consultant in Karlsruhe, Germany and have written a German book about Elasticsearch. If you liked this post you can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my feed to get notified of new posts. If you think I could help you and your company and you'd like to work with me please contact me directly.