CCC Event Weblog

Today was the “kickoff” day at the bcc, our very first day getting everything set up for the congress in the building. As every year, it was mostly a delivery day. Shirts, the proceedings and a lot of other stuff we need for the organization arrived – all the stuff we need quite early in our congress setup.

Most of the hardware used for the congress network is already in the building, huge stacks full of switches and routers were delivered today. Quite a lot of paperwork and unpacking to do – checking for any transportation damage and verifing the serial numbers of the hardware.

One of the rather weird issues this year is that we had to learn we will be affected by the current bad weather situation in the UK. Parts of the hardware which is provided by Force 10 Networks is used in their lab in the UK – and the plane scheduled to deliver this hardware was unable to take off due to foggy weather conditions. However, we are quite confident that the stuff will arrive in time. Everything else worked out quite well until now, even the uplinks to the bcc are already set up.

But: Tomorrow (23.) is our first “real” buildup day. We need a lot of volunteers to set up the whole building, so come and bring your friends – the bcc will be open from 08:00 to 18:00, we take care for food and drinks. See you there!

The congress fahrplan is nearing completion, and we’re starting to plan the details. One important part of this is finding Heralds: volunteers who for a couple of hours are willing to be the main spokesperson in a conference room, who announce the individual sessions, and help out when something goes wrong.

Photo by smallcaps.

This year we would like to have a Herald for every single talk, not just the big ones in Saal 1. That’s quite an ambitious goal (our Herald schedule is comprised of 44 shifts), so we need lots of volunteers!

The job of a Herald is quite simple — main barrier of entry is that you don’t get shy when you introduce a lecture in English in front of a potentially huge crowd… And of course it’s an incredible opportunity to meet some really interesting people at Europe’s largest hacker conference!

For details and a schedule see the Heralds Wiki page. We’re going to have a preliminary meeting to brief our Heralds, so watch this blog for updates.

If you’re interested you can claim a shift by entering your name in the Heralds schedule on our wiki page — and feel free to contact me in case there are questions.

If you have a DVB-T receiver for your computer don’t forget to bring it to 23C3 as we are about to broadcast locally all for lecture rooms via DVB-T this time. This is an experiment and is considered to be an additional way of broadcasting the lectures (we try to provide public TVs and IP Streaming).

We still have problems getting enough TV Sets for 23C3. If you have the option to borrow some sets or know of a source where we could lend 10 to 15 sets, please let us know.

Nobody likes bans and regulations. Some people smoke at the Congress, some don’t. Almost all people hate the smell of cold smoke everywhere after four days at the Congress. So here we are again, asking you to understand and trying to make things acceptable for dislikers of bans and regulations, like ourselves. Here’s what we wrote last year:

Quite an issue last year. Smoking situation was so bad that even heavy smokers complained about the bad air. Of course, smoking is forbidden in the art&beauty-area, the lecture halls and in the Hackcenter, as it was last year.

But for the rings we want to improve the situation and discussed many suggestions in the last months.
As the technical solution for this problem is way to expensive for us – as nerds, we would prefer that of course – we had to find a social one. So here it is: We kindly ask everyone not to smoke in the building. If you really have to smoke, do so, but keep in mind that you show everyone that you are an addict with no sense of social behavior and someone might remind you on our social solution for the smoking situation. We hope you do understand.

Now for the good news: It worked last year, so we don’t see why it shouldn’t work this year, too. Almost everyone who had to went outside and the air was fine indoors. Although it might sound harsh to throw out people and have them bear with the artic winter of Berlin (they don’t call it German Siberia for no reason!), smokers soon discovered something. There’s a grill just outside of the building with a vent blowing up nice warm air, making your cigarette break both nice and stylish. Basically, you’ll look like this:

That said, thank you again for your understanding this year.

Blog TV in Japan shows an Interview with German mobile entepreneur Jan Michael Hess. After some minutes of talking about mobile economy, they mention an event that captures the interest of the Japanese hosts: A hacker conference in Europe. They even learn something important: “Hackers are good people”. Watch it yourself (the interview is partly in English):

Blog TV has a page (in Japanese) that offers additional information. A nice piece that shows people are actually interested in the stuff we do in corners of the world where you wouldn’t expect it. Domo arigato!