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.