• Close to 5 million hits
• Above 500 produced videos (interviews, documentation, news-show)
• More than 500 registered user-authors 
• More than 10000 articles and comments posted
• High medial attention through exclusive interviews (e.g. many federal ministers and CEOs), documentations and news-podcasts.
• Lots of referrers and inter-linking due to high news-coverage by well-established media (refer to Google with search term „IT-Gipfelblog“ or ZDF Mediathek  with seacrh term „IT-Gipfel“)
• Microblogging: Tweeds & Feeds are increasingly used by the users –especially before pre-anounced events

Seminal areas of interest

1. Information society - German prospects
2. Digital Infrastructures
3. IT-based public services in Germany
4. Security
5. Responsibility and trade mark rights
6. High-Tech-strategy for the information society
7. IT and health care
8. Special topic 2010: E-Health
9. Regional focus area 2010: Dresden

The social change in handling and using the internet as an information- and communication platform, a trend often referred to by the notion of Web 2.0, provides plenty of opportunities for this issue: It enables not only a substantially easier collaborative refurbishment of information, but also direct interaction and communication between users. The therefore triggered belief among numerous summit-participants that a public virtual communication platform might be a meaningful and necessary supplement to the efforts undertaken by the actual participants of the IT-summit, resulted in the development of the “IT-summit-blog” with the objective to:

• use the web as a multi-directional mediator, and not solely as a informational medium
• generate new, creative and visionary ideas from the broad public
• offer a platform to develop and leverage collective intelligence on the basis of a participative from of communication
• support the reflux of collaborative knowledge into the continuous work of the summit's working groups
• contribute with a contructive contribution to achieve the overall objective target of the summit

The first national IT-summit in Germany was held on the 18th December 2006 at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam. To reach the ambitious goal set beforehand of becoming the leading business, academic and research location in the ICT-sector worldwide, high-level representatives of the German government and the economy were called upon to clear the path for economic growth and employment, to develop seminal areas of growth and address areas of key interest in the course of the summit. In doing so eight (later nine) task groups were formed, with each of them addressing different critical issues within the ICT-topic such as “IT and SMEs”, “Service- and user-friendly IT”, or “E-Government”.

Every group had to contribute a working draft by the end of the summit, including a profound analysis of the initial situation, addressing the areas of key interest as well as the recommended course of action concerning the main topic each of the groups was working on. The summit was concluded with the so-called “Potsdam Theses”, a commonly formulated declaration by all of the eight task groups, highlighting a first bundle of necessary measures that address the critical areas of key interest being identified in the respective working groups. The completion of these measures was understood by all participating parties as a common responsibility.

Early into the processing and the realization of the summit-results, critical voices increasingly caught public interest. The main point of criticism was the fact that the preparation of the summit, the event itself, and even more important the representation within the task groups was mainly restricted to the German government and the representatives of German big business companies. On top of medium-sized-businesses being highly underrepresented in the working-groups concerning their actual economic contribution and relevance in the Germany ICT-sector, representatives of the general public interest and their opinion were simply non-existent.

Therefore, recognizing the fact that the German public without any doubt represents an important fraction of these stakeholders with respect to issues related to ICT, measures need to be taken, how they can be meaningfully and appropriately be incorporated in the follow-up process of the summit.