Founding the iconet Foundation & Founding Fest

Thursday, September 2nd 2021 was a very special and important date for us. We had our notary appointment and finally turned our vision and work from the past two years into an official organization: The iconet Foundation.

By Sandra Käß

Since this marked the first step of a long journey on our mission to make social networking more efficient, transparent, independent and healthy, we definitely felt like celebrations were in order. We wanted to appreciate the work that has been done so far and at the same time take the opportunity to share what we are building with the public for the very first time.

That’s why we invited our family, friends, supporters and everyone who was interested in getting to know what we are doing to join us on our founding party on the 25th of September.

Two weeks have passed since then, so we thought it’s time to compile a recap of what went down – as a memory for those who were there and a follow-up for those who couldn’t make it!

No more beating around the bush, let's dive right in:

For us, the event already began two weeks earlier. That’s when we started with the preparations. And believe me, there was a lot to do! We arranged for drinks and snacks, prepared a presentation, organized artists, printed and distributed posters, built a stage, designed stickers, painted posters and did advertising. A whole lot of energy, night shifts and creativity went into it. Still, being with such a motivated team felt less like work and more like fun for all of us for sure.

Since we have all been working towards this moment for the last few weeks, we were super excited for the day to finally come. It was a spot landing, but due to the great teamwork of the whole iconet crew, everything was in place by the time we opened the doors at 6pm.

More and more people poured in and everyone started to enjoy the drinks and food we prepared. Btw., our personal food highlight were definitely the vegan hotdogs. And the sandwiches. And the cake. And the … okay we cannot choose; everything was heavenly delicious ;)

To start the actual scheduled event and center everyone’s attention to the stage we organized an open mic session. During the live performances everyone could find their space and settle in, before we started with the more formal part of the evening: our presentation.

In the past, when we were trying to explain what exactly we’re doing at iconet, we often met confused faces. Which is why this presentation was aimed at introducing us and explaining succinctly and precisely what we do, what iconet stands for and how we intend to achieve these goals. We really wanted to take the time to engage in a discussion with everyone and make sure that any uncertainties and misunderstandings were cleared up. It was really nice to see the audience being so invested in learning about the project that is so important to us.

After the presentation and the following discussion, the evening continued with benefit concerts from Sane and temmis who brought great energy and enticed the crowd to dance, sing and have fun together. This was also continued by U-Funk with his crazy awesome funk DJ-set. Huge thanks and hugs to all of them at his point for bringing the music to our iconet founding festivities.

For us, it was great to see how much the people enjoyed the evening and stayed until the morning light to celebrate with us.

Even though we had the capacity for some more people, our first official iconet event was a huge success. It meant a lot to us to finally share our ideas, vision and project with the world for the first time. Changing social networking for the better is a genuine project of the heart for us which we are working on with full commitment and dedication. Introducing it to the world was a pleasure and we cannot wait to see where it takes us from here.

We would like to thank everyone who helped organize and execute such a great event and made it an unforgettable day. It has shown us that the issue is on the minds of so many people which inspires and motivates us to work even harder to make independence, free choice and self-determined action the status quo online.