On behalf of all the free-pass students who attended LIFT'08 through the Gerbert Rüf Stiftung (GRS) fellowship program, I would like to express our sincerest gratitude to the GRS foundation for offering us this unique opportunity. This event wasn't only an eye-opening experience, allowing us to expand our takes on familiar issues and our intellectual horizons on less familiar ones. It also gave us the chance to meet with both academic researchers and industry professionals from a wide variety of backgrounds.

For some of us, these encounters might have a future life-changing impact on our scholar or career paths. For others, the knowledge acquired during the presentations and encounters made during the breaks and meals will help them to successfully carry on their projects, whether in the academia or in the realm of business. But beyond this, we all felt our world views and assumptions about the role of technologies in society challenged in a constructive and positive way. We also got to confront our insights gained in classes with those resulting from professional experiences in discussions with people involved in the industry.

Blogging (almost) live from the conference was another quite engaging and exciting part of our participation in LIFT'08. We not only enjoyed experiencing a new form of "journalism", but also trying out our hands on technologies and community platforms we were not all accustomed to. This forced us to actively reflect on the ideas, discourses and forecasts about the socio-technical evolution of information and communication, instead of simply sitting there and waiting for the words to sip in. Our posts got feedbacks, both in written form, directly on the LIFT blog community site, or in encounters with people we often didn't know at all. This generated very interesting conversations and ideas for potential project collaborations.

No matter what each of us came to look for in this 3-days long conference, I believe that all of us found something valuable in it, both in terms of ideas and meeting with often brilliant people. We will also keep in touch in the future and continue the threads of discussions initiated during LIFT'08 online and offline.

As we are still in the stage when we devote most of our time to studying, we wouldn't have had the financial means to afford the entrance fee to LIFT’08 without the Gerbert Rüf Stiftung fellowship program, even those of us who are engaged in student jobs. We definitely hope that other students will be able to benefit of such programs so as to contribute to the reinforcing of the bridges between the academic realm, the public institutions and the industry.

We all thank the Gerbert Rüf Stiftung very much for selecting us for this fellowship and giving us the opportunity to live such a positive experience. We will keep an excellent souvenir of this conference and hopefully, we'll be able to attend the next LIFT events.

Ariane Beldi, Switzerland

Andy Blanco, USA
Benedikt Foit, Germany
Bernhard Schindlholzer, Switzerland
Corinna Kester, UK
Cornelius Rabsch, Germany
Daniel Voelzke, Switzerland
Estefania Gomez, Mexico
Gaurav Narang, India
Laura Pandelle, France
Lex Wang, Netherlands
Louis-Eric Maucout, France
Maria Laura Mendez-marten, Costa Rica
Melissa Adey, UK
Mirweis Sangin, Switzerland
Nadya Peek, Netherlands
Nicolas Jones, Switzerland
Philippe De Ridder, Belgium
Pierre Cloarec, France
Suno Huang, Republic of China