From Screens to Summits: My SUNRISE Experience
As part of the Global Distributed Software Development (GDSD) course at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, I had the chance to work on the One Stop Shop (OSS) project, a platform designed to connect students, researchers, and companies across the nine European universities in the SUNRISE alliance. The work was fully distributed: teammates spread across different countries, collaborating remotely over weeks. What made the experience even more special was being selected to attend the Global Impact Forum & SUNRISE Summit 2026 in Sweden, where all of that remote work suddenly had a stage.
Attending the summit at Mälardalens University was a genuinely exciting experience. I had the opportunity to speak on a panel, represent unibz, and meet in person the people I had only known through a screen. Walking into that lecture hall, badge around my neck, knowing I had contributed to something real across borders, was a feeling I didn’t expect to be so meaningful. The event also gave me a broader picture of what SUNRISE is actually building: not just software, but real connections between universities, businesses, and communities across Europe.
Speaking on the panel at the Global Impact Forum
None of this would have happened without the support I received from UNIBZ. My professor’s guidance throughout the project was invaluable, keeping the team aligned and focused even when working across different university systems. Having a teammate from the same university also made a real difference. Something is grounding about having someone who shares your home base when you’re navigating a truly international team, and that support carried through to the summit itself.
One of the warmest moments of the trip was something small but deeply meaningful. When our distributed teammates finally met in person, we exchanged coins from each of our home countries as a token of the friendship we had built over months of working remotely. It was a simple gesture, but it captured something that no status update or video call could ever quite capture: that behind every screen there are real people, and that this project had brought us genuinely closer together.
