I was lucky enough to get a ticket for the Chaos Communication Congress 2011 in Berlin, Germany. So many people wanted to attend the CCCongress that the tickets were sold out in an instant. But the current location can’t handle more visitors so we’re forced to somehow limit the number of visitors unless the location or the concept of the CCCongress changes. Both options don’t sound really inviting, but refusing people to come isn’t fun either. So we’ll see what the future brings.
But I’d like to raise the point that the CCCongress is very much an event made by the people, i.e. the participants. It’s not that there is an overly mighty set of people who decide everything and are responsible for having a great event. It’s everybody that is responsible for helping out if somethings need to be done, contributing ideas, talks, workshop, etc. It’s rather a place where you play a part by helping physically and paying a fraction of the cost to have a good time. That means that you can’t make a CCCongress by paying the entrance fee only. It’s not a show for your entertainment. Hence you can’t have expectations that somebody has to do things for you. This applies to things you don’t like, too. If you don’t like stuff that is happening, stand up and change it. Don’t sit and complain. This especially applies to things like sexism or other politically incorrect things. There is no personnel being obliged to do anything. It’s all our big party and you’re supposed to contribute yourself to make it great. I mention this, because there were complaints about supposedly right-wing people being present but nobody did anything.
Many people go to the CCCongress for the talks. And well, I didn’t really managed to watch many of them, but the following make a list of notable talks, because they were in some ways, say, “interesting”.
- Taking control over the Tor network
Well, it’s strong French with way too packed slides… - Quantified-Self and OpenBCI Neurofeedback Mind-Hacking
Haven’t seen it yet but is supposed to be very esoteric… - Power gadgets with your own electricity
People were quite upset because it was a bit off and nothing was really told…
But you can have very good talks as well. For example
A very big applause needs to be given to the video team. It’s just amazing that the recordings were available within a few days. I just envy those guys for rocking so hard.
Now it’s time for a shameless plug: As I want to watch the recordings of this CCCongress and I know that I won’t do it myself, because the last years proof that I don’t watch the videos anyway, I’ll publicly show two videos of the recordings every Wednesday in the local Chaos Computer Club. So if your disk is filling up with videos that you wanted to watch but never will, feel free to show up on the “Chaotic Congress Cinema“. Funny thing is, that there are 100 videos recorded and if we watch 2 videos every week, we’d finish all of them within the year 🙂
