 Ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome on behalf of the University of Bremen and on behalf of the Faculty of Business Studies and Economics. My name is Jochen Simmerman. I'm the Dean of the Faculty of Business Studies and Economics and I have the honour to open this really wonderful symposium that Lars Hornoff has organised with his collaborators. I think the crowdfunding symposium deals with a fascinating and also multifaceted problem. It deals with crowd work, cloud work, gig work, online freelancing and other forms of on-demand labour and when you think of crowd, cloud, gig, all of these things and all of these names are pretty novel to me and I do think they're a real new phenomenon that's worthwhile discussing. I'm glad that you do this at the University of Bremen but it is also a very good place to do it just here. Bremen is a very young university, it was founded in 1971 first just to supply teacher training and its research was mainly in the social sciences when it was founded in the 70s on progressive topics and with new and innovative methods. In the 1980s the university grew with its natural sciences and the engineering faculties. We now have several research areas in which we focus, that's the marine sciences, is informatics, you're in the building of informatics here so when you think about why is this so wonderful, there's a lot of third party funding that our dear friends of the informatics faculty bring in. We have a research area in materials technology, the welfare state, health and logistics. At the University of Bremen we have around 250 professors, we have 20,000 students, we have all traditional fields with the exception of medicine. Medicine is the only thing that the university does not offer in teaching and research. Bremen is also a university that, at least of a kind, is big on on-demand labour. More than one third of our funds are from third party resources, they're project based and the employment that we have at the university is centred around these kind of projects and in that kind of perspective it is precarious and it's a challenge that you will discuss in a slightly different setting but it is something that we also face in our day-to-day work and dealing with these issues. At the Faculty of Business Studies and Economics the situation is slightly different. We have 25 professors, about 140 staff, 3,500 students and the courses that we offer at the programmes at bachelor and master level are on business, economics. We offer programmes jointly with the colleagues from engineering, with the colleagues from informatics and with the colleagues from psychology. We are an interdisciplinary university and you also discuss real world phenomena from an interdisciplinary setting. Your speakers come at this conference from business administration, from economics, from information systems, sociology, psychology and the law. And I do think that approach that this symposium takes is just the right thing to do because if you want to discuss real world problems and if you want to approach them from an institutional perspective you need to bring scientists together from different fields and I believe that is the only way where you can really generate knowledge that is policy relevant or relevant for the well-being of the society. I've looked at the programme, I counted, I've been counting 12 speakers, 6 commentators and about 40 conference participants. I admit that I haven't looked at everybody's CV but at least at some and it leaves me with the impression that Lars has gathered here in Bremen one of the most relevant researchers in the field of crowd-working. And I'm glad that you found your way into the German Northwest from far-flung places and from places even as far as Taiwan. As the German economy turns into a recession and as Germany has one of the biggest low-wage sectors in Europe, the labour question, fair wages, fair employment practices will become more virulent and more pressing. And therefore it is very topical that you have found also a keynote speaker that deals with labour market issues and that a lot of the discussions that you have at this conference will deal with labour relations. Jan Marco Leimermeister in his keynote, a renowned scholar of online labour markets will speak about how the nature of work affects satisfaction and identification among ground workers. I wish you a fruitful conference, good talks and discussions. I hope that you will have also some time to explore the very leafy and livable city of Bremen and that you go back to your respective places with a perspective to return to Bremen because either we have great scientists like Lars Hornev or we have a wonderful place where it's great to live or what would be even better, of course, if for both reasons you will return. Have a good conference. Thank you very much.