The history of events organized by Germans at CHI is long and started way before the labs joined forces under the German HCI flag. In the early days, the Käse & Wein (cheese & wine) parties organized by Jan Borchers from RWTH Aachen marked the starting point:
2009 – Boston
The first Wine & Cheese party organized by Jan Borchers from the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University. The event took place at the Suite at the Elliot Hotel.
2010 – Atlanta
The second edition took place in Atlanta, in the Hyatt Regency Hotel Suite.
2011 – Vancouver
In the 2011, the party happened in a special format as it merged together with the University of Toronto Party, the Tequila Party, and the new Interactivity Party to one big network event taking place in Smiley’s Public House.
2012 – Austin
When CHI visited Austin, Jan Borchers was joined by Floyd Mueller (Exertion Games Lab, RMIT University) and Patrick Baudisch (Hasso Plattner Institute) as co-hosts. The event took place in a bar called MugShots.
2013 – Paris
The now fifth edition was co-hosted by Jan Borchers, Floyd Mueller, and Jürgen Steimle (Saarland University). 200 people were invited to join the event in the Restaurant LR Paris 17.
2014 – Toronto
Similar to 2013, the event was again organized by Jan Borchers, Floyd Mueller, and Jürgen Steimle, this time joined by Lennart Nacke (University of Waterloo). That year’s location was the Fionn MacCool’s – Front Street (Pub) and about 300 people were invited.
2015 & 2016
In 2015 and 2016, the Cheese & Wine parties took a break and no German events happened. At the 2016 CHI in San Jose, Thijs Roumen and Patrick Baudisch from the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) took the initiative to revive the tradition of a German network event and started to reach out to other German labs. Eventually, this effort resulted in the first German HCI event as we currently know it in Denver in 2017—with over 600 invites sent out.