Dear OsmoDevCon attendees,
this sounds a bit like a joke, but unfortunately it isn't.
At a construction site about 600m away from the OsmoDevCon venue (IN-Berlin), an unexploded bomb from second world war was found. This bomb is going to be defused this Friday, which is exactly the first day of OsmoDevCon.
For our international guests: This is not a very uncommon event. Even 73 years after the war, many German cities still have plenty of unexploded bombs in the ground, which are uncovered during construction work. It's usually not a big deal and the success ratio of defusing them is extremely high.
However, of course, for safety reasons, police is evacuating a radius of 800m around the bomb site, which means *we are unable to use our intended venue this Friday!*
You can find a map with the preliminary evacuation zone at: https://www.morgenpost.de/bin/bmo-214049359.jpg
As you can see, not only is the OsmoDevCon venue at Lehrter Str. 53 affected, but also various nearby hotels, such as * A&O Hostel * Motel One Berlin * Jugendgaestehaus Berlin
So if you are staying at any one of those locations, be prepared that from Friday 9am onwards you will not be able to reach or enter those hotels.
To make things worse, Berlin central station (Hauptbahnhof) is inside the evacuation zone, too. It is expacted that all public transport, as well as regional and long distance trains are halted during the evacuation period.
We're looking for an alternative venue on Friday and will keep you posted. If we can find one, this means we'd be at IN-Berlin only Sat, Sun and Mon, but would be at that different venue on Friday.
German Police has announced to publish more details later today, on which we'll also keep you posted.
Regards, Harald