German Informatics uses Mattermost to accelerate research timelines 6x & ensure GDPR compliance

The German Informatics Society (GI) is Germany’s largest professional association of computer scientists and IT professionals. A nonprofit organization, GI aims to promote the exchange of technological ideas, raise public awareness on relevant topics, and encourage women and young folks to enter technical fields. The society consists of 20,000 German-speaking computer scientists, professors, and students as well as representatives from 250 corporations, including critical infrastructure enterprises like Bayer, IBM, and SAP. 

“We want to be the voice for computer science in Germany and the German-speaking region,” says Stefan Hildebrand, an executive board member at GI who leads the organization’s Junior Fellows program and is also a research associate at TU Berlin. 

Founded in Bonn, Germany in 1969, GI focuses on the evolution of informatics, pursuing several diverse fields of study, including artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, human-computer interaction, and computer security. The organization — which writes position papers to influence public policy and connects students with prospective employers — is active throughout Germany, with roughly 30 chapters spread out across the country. 

Increasing focus: Reducing email overload with more flexible communication 

As a distributed organization committed to advancing the field of informatics, GI requires tight-knit collaboration to fulfill its mission. Hildebrand had been using mailing lists to coordinate with the students in the Junior Fellows program but felt as though the organization had outgrown email as the primary method of communication. 

“It works, but it doesn’t work always for everything, and it’s not the fastest option,” Hildebrand says. “Mailing lists don’t allow flexibility. Inboxes are also overloaded these days. We don’t want to get on people’s nerves by sending unsolicited emails that aren’t of interest.” 

Since GI covers a broad range of topics, inboxes can become cluttered quickly when conversations occur over email. To solve this problem, the organization needed a new communication solution that enabled members to instantly connect and collaborate with each other whenever they decided to explore new issues.  

At the same time, the right solution would also support the creation of multiple teams; ideally, GI would be able to connect its communication platform to the German Chapter of the ACM to enable cross-organizational collaboration between the two organizations. 

Centralizing collaboration & protecting personal data: Using Mattermost to engage a community 

During the pandemic, Hildebrand was working for a previous employer and was tasked with finding a collaboration solution his team could use to stay connected while everyone worked from home.  

“When COVID-19 hit us in 2020, we needed a new communication tool,” Hildebrand says. “At the time, we didn’t have any experience with internal chat. We started researching the market, and we were bound by very strict data protection rules. So, our solution needed to be very safe and very secure, and ideally self-hosted. That ruled out all options like Slack, which are hosted on other companies’ servers. But Slack’s user interface is less appealing and less quick anyway.”   

As part of the process, Hildebrand also investigated Discord and encrypted chat solutions like Riot and Matrix. 

“It turned out that there were performance bottlenecks because the encryption would consume a lot of CPU capacity,” he continues. “So, we decided on the high-performance option, and that was Mattermost. We could host it ourselves on-premises, the connection is encrypted with SSL in the web app, and the UI was perfect for our use cases. Mattermost can be hosted on very, very little hardware; it’s very, very efficient and does not need a lot of IT administration.” 

Unlike other self-hosted solutions that require heavy IT resources, Mattermost delivers enterprise-grade security and compliance with minimal overhead — a critical advantage for organizations looking to scale securely. 

In Hildebrand’s experience, Mattermost was faster and more versatile than other options. Even better, Mattermost was open source — the type of software computer scientists prefer — making it the clear winner. 

“The biggest thing actually is the user interface,” he explains. “It’s intuitive, it’s direct, it’s fast. There’s no lag. It’s highly efficient.”  

Around this time, Hildebrand also needed a communications solution for an educational project he co-founded called the BYTE Challenge; he went with Mattermost again. So, when it came time to choose a secure collaboration platform for GI, Mattermost was an easy choice for Hildebrand, who already had success with it at two organizations. Since GI would be managing student data, Hildebrand was particularly impressed by Mattermost’s robust data controls, which are critical for all regulated industries and enabled the organization to ensure GDPR compliance with complete data sovereignty. 

“Mattermost is awesome and has swift performance, low hardware requirements, a multitude of features and — most importantly — the high level of data protection and great GDPR compliance when hosting it on our own hardware or in a GDPR-compliant data center,” Hildebrand explains. “The data protection was easy to manage. We just needed to document our plan, but we didn’t need to adjust any processes. Everything was there.” 

Primarily, GI uses Mattermost as a community platform where research moves forward. 

“It’s a very good project management tool because we can share files, address people directly, and use Boards,” Hildebrand continues. “Our special interest groups and member teams can use it to organize themselves and work together on their projects. The Junior Fellows are already exclusively organized on Mattermost instead of mailing lists.”  

With Mattermost, members can instantaneously connect with each other, forming groups and spinning up topic-specific channels for more focused and efficient collaboration. 

Fulfilling their mission: Moving researching forward faster & helping students find jobs 

Mattermost enables GI to fulfill its mission of accelerating groundbreaking informatics research, raising awareness about computer science and IT, and influencing public policy. The platform also helps student members communicate with teachers and business professionals from companies like IBM, SAP, Rohde & Schwarz, and Bayer, forming relationships through digital networking. 

“Professors and students can meet, chat, and connect via our Mattermost platform,” Hildebrand says. “Students use Mattermost for networking and connections for reference letters, to help with thesis projects, and for informal counseling — like on which courses to take. This is a growing, lived practice.” 

Mattermost has already had a tremendous impact on the Junior Fellows students. Looking ahead, Hildebrand plans to roll out the solution across the entire organization, introducing Mattermost Professional Edition to support collaboration at scale with thousands of concurrent users. 

“Our experience with Mattermost is so great that we want to also offer it to the whole member group of the German Informatics Society,” Hildebrand explains. “It scales like a charm. Whatever project size you have, you can do it in Mattermost. We can create groups for each topic for discussion and use it as the primary digital networking tool. Once all members have access to Mattermost, we can use it to organize more events with employers — like connected workshops and our annual conference.” 

Looking ahead, the organization is planning to begin collaborating with the German Chapter of ACM on their Mattermost instance. 

“The question is: How can I engage the users in Mattermost for everything? Because it’s such a great tool that you shouldn’t even use anything else,” he says. 

Maintaining security with granular permissions 

As an education-adjacent organization, GI is laser-focused on protecting student privacy, health, and well-being. To this end, Hildebrand needs to ensure that students aren’t behaving badly on Mattermost and that no one is attacking anyone else; Mattermost’s advanced permissions make this easy to facilitate.   

“We’ve customized Mattermost in a way where no direct interaction between the students is allowed without a third account being inside the group chat or channel working as a moderator,” Hildebrand says, adding that the platform’s access controls also help keep students safe by ensuring only authorized users can access their instance. “You can make sure that no one you don’t know and don’t want on the platform can log in and create an account.” 

Accelerating project timelines 6x with improved collaboration 

Thanks to Mattermost’s user-friendly design, GI members were able to figure out how to use the platform productively in short order. 

“We all got so used to it — it was so intuitive to learn how to use Mattermost,” Hildebrand continues. “And if I talk to others who have tried Mattermost once, even those who are not technical, they’re all happy with it.” 

Recently, GI was working on a research proposal with four universities, one company, and two nonprofits. Using Mattermost, the project — which usually would take an average of six months and no shorter than two months — was wrapped up in a month. 

“It was an extremely short time for this kind of project,” Hildebrand explains. “We were informed about the project very late and tried to hop on board and do it as fast as we could, and Mattermost helped us deliver on that front.” 

Hildebrand attributed this condensed timeline to the fact that team members could communicate with each other at any time of the day on Mattermost and didn’t have to waste time writing, reading, or organizing emails. 

“We could even avoid some calls,” Hildebrand says. “That is accelerating all kinds of projects.”  

Mattermost has also enabled students and younger members of GI to easily join in on discussions and share their ideas, giving the organization a broader perspective to aid in decision-making. 

High performance  

As GI’s Mattermost footprint continues to grow — users regularly spin up their own public and private channels — Hildebrand is impressed at how the platform continues to perform despite the significant uptick in usage. 

“I’m not seeing any speed lag or any slowing down of the server,” he says. “Mattermost on our own small-scale server has the best performance of all tools. The loading time is fast. The reaction time is fast. Search is fast. It’s amazingly efficient and takes 10 to 15 minutes to install.” 

Based on his experience with Mattermost, Hildebrand is quick to recommend the platform to any organization looking to streamline internal communication and cross-agency collaboration. Increasingly, he’s seeing other academic groups in Germany spinning up their own Mattermost servers. 

“If we didn’t have Mattermost, I wouldn’t even know what to do,” Hildebrand concludes. “I have no idea how this project would be managed without Mattermost.”