Feedback

From Chaos Communication Camp 2007

What should be improved at the next camp ?

What was ubercool ?

Please give feedback/discuss!

Contents 1 General 2 Toilets/Showers 3 Catering 4 Parking 5 Network 6 Power 7 Campground 8 Nightlife 9 Lectures 10 Misc 11 Weather 12 Transportation 13 Feedback from BugBlue

[edit] General

• I was blown away. Thanks to everyone who made it possible. You rule!
• I had a great time at the camp. Thx to all who made this possible.
• Awesome event! All the people complaining about the 150 Euro to pay can shut their trap! ;-)

(did anyone actually complain about that?) JureKoren 16:17, 14 August 2007 (CEST)

• Yes, it was great yankee 07:13, 14 August 2007 (CEST)
• The atmosphere! -- Relet 23:07, 14 August 2007 (CEST)
• I had a fantastic time, even loads better then I expected, thank you!
• The best international event in 2007. I love to become a part of it FrankO.

[edit] Toilets/Showers

• The situation wasn't perfect, but I didn't find it to awful either. More toilets/showers - yes, please! BUT: There were always people standing in line at the dirty toilet containers, while there were plenty free and relativly clean Dixis almost noone used. I never had to wait when using the dixies, and they were much cleaner. Why did you all stand in line to use the dirtiest toilets on the camp? Don't get it.

• The shower/toilet situation was really awful. Next time we need at least the triple amount of facilities. Please, no Dixis, rent shower/toilet containers. The current situation wont attract more girls to the event :)

• Same for me, this was really bad.

• I agree, too less toilets and showers

• ACK

• Clean and mostly empty Dixis, one even with a ftp-server and music - nice ;)

• everytime the same shit - literally. unable to learn from past events?

• I second that, I never had to wait more than five minute for a shower or a water toilet.

--ScottyTM 15:43, 12 August 2007 (CEST)

• A few more shower/toilet containers wouldn't hurt next time.

• I don't mind queuing to shower first thing in the morning but the facilities were pretty gross, even by camping standards - deep mud/crap in the showers and rusty broken doors to the toilets is not cool...

• While placing dixis in the middle of camping areas seemed a strange concept it kind of worked for me, at least the ones camping directly next to them were trying to keep them clean. sadly for them, they still camped directly next to a no matter how hard you try incredibly stinking dixi, very uncool..

• place dixie not on the camping group but close to it, it will not smell like hell and it will be easier to clean and transport them

• more cleaning personal for the showers and restrooms

• to less facilities, very dirty

• More toilets! And if not, more blue water! Blue water good.

• Toilets were mostly ok. It's Dixie, so you know what to expect...

• I never waited for a shower at all. In fact I was usually alone at 5 o'clock in the afternoons :-). In the mornings it was jamned, but why does everybody want to shower at the same time? ;-). Anyway I liked the situation. Of course there is mud on the flour if everybody is walking in with their muddy shoes I do not think this could be prevented.I am very happy we had water toilets :-). yankee 07:13, 14 August 2007 (CEST)

• smarter placement of the Dixies, one filed had none of the (tents behind camper area). Put the somewhere in a distributed pattern but still ensure that they get serviced daily.

• more clean Water and more fresh Water station

• Toilets were ok, I never had to use the showers. (I live close by, not what you'd think)

• The number of sanitary facilities was OK. The state of them wasn't (no dors, no locks, some tube constructions, ... it was ramshackle)

• Toilets and showers were ok. The water coming from the taps is a little disgusting (but not noxious at all - one can get used to it). The people cleaning showers and toilets at daytime were nice - industrious and always friendly. Maybe it would be possible to persuade some volunteers to mop the toilets once or twice every night and provide new toilet paper and soap at this occasion. In the place where we stayed - between Milliways, the campers and the woods - there were no Dixies at all. Going to the toilet was a walk of estimated 5 minutes. I would appreciate to have more Dixies better distributed over the campground next time. Most Dixi-toilets I used had broken locks or none at all - so maybe try another rental service which provides newer or better serviced plastic toilets. The Dixi-situation at WTH was much better - if there had been clean and operational Dixies nearly everwhere, I (and most other people, too) would have used the Dixies instead of water toilets and would have filled the sewage-container less often. The mouldy curtains at the shower-containers were not extremly delicious. I would suggest to rent showers without any curtains and install cheap curtains from the local Baumarkt.

• More and cleaner toilets and showers would not be a huge luxury, even though I didn't have too much trouble

• Well, maybe this is a personal issue, but almost everytime when I wanted to go to the women showers or toilets someone did clean them at that time, so it I had to wait or come back later. I was really annoyed by that, altough I really appreciated the job of the cleaning guys. I just had the feeling they did their job too often or something. It's like I saw them all the time.

[edit] Catering

• The Thai/Indian guys were absolutly awesome. Great food, and very fair price. The pasta, on the other hand, wasn't worth the 4€ - but they made great coffee, so I forgive them. 2-3 more caterers would have been great for more varity and shorter lines.

• The catering crew (pizza) was very slow (and sometimes unfriendly). Try to get some professional food suppliers to the next camp who actually want to earn money (high throughput). -- The result of that system was seen at what the hack. I was not impressed with the catering situation at WTH. Some of the grassroots cooking that was done there and on this camp (some people know who I am talking about) was much better (and cheaper). Perhaps a cooking for nerds workshop would be a good idea.

• The "local" Pizza Service had a awful quality and a bad service.

• I don't care I brought my own food. Drinks were OK.

• We need separate people selling food. Pasta and Thai were the same, we don't want monopols.

• Catering was ok. Not as good as last camp, not as bad as the WTH one. Bring back the Tipi

• Expensive food. I don't want to pay up to 4 euros for a little portion, which tasted only acceptable

• Maybe a little cheaper food next time.

• pasta was cheapest discounter-stuff. Worth max. 0.2euro --> sold for 4.00. sucks ass.

• It was good to have the thai/indian stuff there, and the soft eis was good too - I didn't expect there to be catering so it was a good surprise.

• While i appreciate the fact that the food suppliers were not the ultra-professional type I still have say they seemed extremely uninterested in selling food (sometimes I went away bored of not being served) and sometimes incredibly slow - which is a pain in the ass when there are dozens of ppl in row

• Please also display the things you sell in English next time as I don't understand all German words.

• definitly not enough caterers, very long time to wait (crepes, thai, indian, pizza: 30-60min), thai and crepes where very good and cheap

• loved the thai/indian stuff - and fruits/cereals in the morning were just great!

• The Coffee/Pasta people saved my life!

• The ice-cream car was a great idea, most food was a little expensive but good. I'd like to know what the status of the food stands is, commercial, volunteer?

• Not possible to survive w/o self organinzed food. Wireless open kitchen was great, this kind of donation based village kitchens shall be encouradget next time.

• Too less food verity and much to expensive. Can I bring my grandma' to cook a great portion of "Kässpätzle" next time?

• Drinking water was a bit of a hassle. Filling my bottle at the toilets was not very nice, and the water distributor near the camp fire was really bad to use. Next time I'd like to have a clearly marked DRINKING water station of some kind. A place that’s clean and usable without getting wet.

• Drinking water near or inside the lecture bunkers could have been handy. Perhaps some emergency bottles and cups that people can use when someone is about to faint ("In case of emergency: fill glass") ? While the hackcenter was relatively cool, the lecture halls were warm and damp at times.

• Food was really nice, but a bit too expensive to rely on it.

• You might want to notify the surrounding supermarkets and hardware store in advance of our arrival, to allow them to stock up on geek-foo.

• Pizza/Breakfast was good and staff was friendly, even when they got showerd, too. Bar-People had good prices, but very unfriendly and arrogant staff.

• Crepes were delicious and fair price. Bratwurst was good quality and tasted good, average price. Pasta was only acceptable and too expensive. Scrambled eggs with toast were good too.

• Some photos of the meals and the price (especially at the Indian snack bar) could help to decide

• More different possibilities for food would have been great. Thai and nan-place was great, pizza not that much.

[edit] Parking

• The unloading situation was confusing - sometimes allowed, sometimes not? Have to agree with the person beneath me. Can't exspect people to carry heavy equipment all the way - depending where you parked and where you camped, the distance could become quite long.

• The wiki said that its possible to bring your car to the campsite to unload your stuff, but on tuesday (thats actually before the event) evening it was forbidden. Its not clever to let people carry their (heavy/lot) stuff some hundred meters, when its about 30 degrees.

• We also arrived on tuesday based on this announcement and were facing huge problems due to that. we would have arrived on monday or even earlier if we had known beforehand.

• Agree this was not done in a good way.

• Parking was ok. Some "Bollerwagen" would have been nice

• Agree with the first. All perfect.

• yes some Transportation from the Parking to the camp will be nice ....

• more Parking spots ..... we had trouble to find spots .... so we had to create some in middle of nowhere ...

• arrived at tuesday 5 pm, was allowed to drive inside the camping area: *thumbsup*, but not enough parking lots, couldn't drive to the city for food or something else, because then our parking lot would be taken

• It was really full, perhaps next time you should plan more place for cars

• The one way road organization was good, but why was it not the other way around? It would have made the "carboys" superfluous.yankee 07:13, 14 August 2007 (CEST)

[edit] Network

• All in all, worked great for me. Only DNS Problems sucked.

• If the network at the next camp will be as bad as this time (we know, you did your best!) try to setup a readonly wiki mirror in the internal network, its the core information system.

• Sucked most of the time. Maybe not your fault but I can't tell.

• Could have been more stable

• A stable DNS Server, often downtimes of it. Only opendns helped...

But besides the Network was fast and no more problems, except the stability.

• DHCP sucked
• Nobody needs DHCP if also fixed IPs Available. So try to get more l33t and configure a fixed IP on your win.

• What is very bad - that on the 2. Day the network work good.

• DNS / DHCP Problems

• Switches down / While power outtake .... placing indoor power outlets on a camping ground is not goooood !!

• single point of failure ..... just one uplink and this one is just going in the middle of nowhere, cant tell what could happed with this

• no problem with the network, everything perfect

• Don't know what people are complaining about, it worked nicely for me

• Worked most of the time, I was satisfied. / Fileservers were much to slow most of the time ;)

• Worked fine, was out of leases only once for me.

• A read-only blog/wiki/feed on an internal address which is always reachable to camp attendees full-speed with all the latest news about camp network outages /campnews /storms coming/shower news, etc.

• DHCP lease time of 500 secs is suboptimal

[edit] Power

• Perfect. Had more than enough power. Only got nervous when the power lines got flooded on saturday. To much hesitation about cutting power - safety first.

• please provide more outdoor outlets and waterproofed stuff

• Worked fine

• 

[edit] Campground

• WOW. Hope we can get it again the next time. Best thing ever.

• Check the area where you allow camping. Behind cbase/milliways the floor was full of rusty barbwire!
  • Please help us to cleanup next time. We trashed a shitload of it upfront BugBlue

• Excellent site!!!! Camping area was a little to small.

• Awesome. Really!

• Great Campsite!

• FANTASTIC

• p-e-r-f-e-c-t

• Cool Location nice Nightlife

• Protect the Poweroutlets and the switches against the Water.

• Create Cable Trays for a besser structure

• Maybe mark the camp ground that we are able to prebook space or to see where "my friends" and the diffrents workshops areas are ...

• more space for Caravan

• NICE!

• I was fascinated.Actually I am still fascinated. It was awesome! yankee 07:13, 14 August 2007 (CEST)

• Totally awesome. Never had such an experience even on commercial grounds. Big props to the museum.

• the location was the best ever, really fantastic, everyone talked about the great atmosphere with those bunkers and Migs.

• I found barbwire at the parking lot...

• fantastic location! Next time, warn the Migs Honkhase is coming though, so they can roll aside on time.

[edit] Nightlife

• That alone was worth the trip. Really.

• The night illumination was unbelievable - perfect!

• The fire and drum stuff was very cool.

• Super!!!1

• Awesome, too. Wouldn't know anything that could be done better.

• Best Nighlife ever seen!!!

• uberhammer

• Very cool - especially the quadrocopters and the mirror-ball-in-a-tree.

• Ubercool! Really loved the lights

• nice and lovely

• Neon night life and atmosphere was super

• Lacking words. Incredible!

• The light show rocked as last time. I really missed that on WTH.

• Invite that laser guy(s) to the next event.

• More Kraftwerk during the night. Ohm Sweet Ohm at 6 a.m. for a good night's sleep.

• I kind of missed a central real bar/dance place. Like WhatTheBar and the tent with the pinball machines next to it.

• 10/10 for the lighting, especially the german tank-spotlights transformed to searchlights on top of the bunkers, and of course the mirrorball/hammock place in the trees, beautiful.

• This was incredible. There was also no problem to sleep, even though the spotlights pointed on my tent and the music plays next to my tent. GREAT!

• you mean there was a difference between night/daylife? I just had a blast 24/7 with a nap every now and then. Anyway, it was awesome. Loved the music, the lights, the hammocks, the atmosphere :) I was glad I brought earplugs for those necessary zzz's though

[edit] Lectures

• Good content in most of the lectures, lots of great stuff. Only terrible sound quality in some lectures, sh'/hissing-noises got extremly amplified in some cases. Seemed to improve during time.

• Please provide the fahrplan in a printable format (FF and IE failed) <-- what are you talking about? <-- about the Fahrplan Table in the wiki that is not a html table but made of divs that are clipped by all browsers when printed

• Lectures were fine, a nice mixture and this time the speakers choose their correct language.

• Good stuff.

• Great Lectures. Maybe more Workshops, maybe also from the Authors of the Lectures.

• Good Lectures, when can I download them ?

• For the Workshops a Fahrplan as well ? The Workshops could be better organized

• Last Minute infos for the lectures please in the irc or on the wiki, it sucks to go to the lectures and been told that we put 2 lectures together

• Please start on time - that will make it more professional

• Please check you hardware before you start your lecture !!

• Speak more clearly - nothing sucks more if people could not speak english very well ..

• content: mostly very good, presentationtechnique: awful!!! please send your speakers to a rhetoric camp or something else before.. =/

• Sometimes it was very hard to understand due to the reflextion of the soundwaves. I attended one lecture while there was no power for a couple of minutes. It was MUCH easier to understand the speaker compared to the amplified speaker later.yankee 07:14, 14 August 2007 (CEST)

• would be great if all presentations were made available for further reference

• For a non-german speaker, it was a bit unfortunate 50% of the lectures were in german (maybe it was less and it just seemed 50% to us ;-) As the camplanguage is broken-english anyway, why not have all lectures in english, like WTH.

• cant agree, there were 14 german lectures of about 70 in total. btw. for a german speaker its also unfortunate to listen to german people speaking english ;)

• There was a annoying echo in the shelter. Next time only topics relating to a country should be in the countries language.
  • I'll ask the people from estonia for you :P BugBlue

[edit] Misc

• Best surprise ever: Andrew Unruh and the drumtables. Made me so happy - still got blisters on my hands from drumming myself to trance. :)
• POC service was perfect.
• Enforce the no-dog-policy or at least the dog-only-on-a-leash-policy.
  • I second that. I saw a dog tagging tents near the road and was told it belongs to the "Chef"/boss, whoever that is. Keep an eye on your dogs.
  • Leash is a must.
  • I saw a dog 1 Second before he bite an RC-Car (his owner could call him back) but this is one big reason for a dog-only-on-a-leash-policy on such a camp.

• Nice People everywhere, great IRC Sessions, friendly Helpdesk, PoC and Technic people.
• Thank you for smoking. =(
• I sit comfortably under a Mig-23 and a dog shits straight before my laptop. Such things really sucks!
• All Dogs on a Leash!
• All Dogs left at home!
• Make the hackcenter more centralized, it used to be the center of attention in 2003, but this time it was out in nowhere
• I had some not so nice encounters with camp security: 1st thing anybody said to me after arrival at the camp was "you are not allowed here" (i was standing next to that backstage-entrance). another very uncomfortable event was two security-guys suddenly standing in the tent waving flashlights at our faces and asking for wristbands - which even repeated on the night to sunday(!)
• Spiderpig was awesome
• No dogs!
• Please place the big rubbish container not on the camping ground
• I had a black dog (a black malinois, on a leash at all times). If it bothered you, please tell me. I'd hate to see dogs banned because some people can't handle their own pets. JureKoren 16:17, 14 August 2007 (CEST)
  • Your dog made me feel uncomfortable at first, but then I saw it behaved well and wasn't agressive at all, so cool with me. Problem is, every dog-owner things he can handle his pets... some are right, as you obviously were, but those who aren't often lack the insight to accept it.
  • There is a doghandler's license (Sachkunde-Prüfung für den Hundehalter, required by many muncipalities for handling a dog in an urban area). Maybe it would be a good idea if dog owners attending future events would be checked for these.
• It would be nice to have lockers for laptops etc. (I would like to see lockers in the congress, too.)
• Next time it would be useful, if Campers are allowed in the family-village. Because lot of the youngest Nerds (age 2 and lower) are better hosted in a camper and in a more silent vicintiy
• What about a system where you can fill out an secure online form with your contact informations (DECT, home telephone number, address, name, DECT of friends, ...) and get an ID / Number which you can stick (already at home) on your valuable devices. Now the "lost & found crew" can contact you or your frinds at the camp or at home if they found your device with the ID, because ONLY they can get the contact informations to the IDs on the device.
  • Nice idea. I would suggest to use the DECT-Number as ID to stick on your equipment. This enables everybody on the camp who finds your stuff to contact you immediately.
• lockers would've been a great idea for those who feel the need to use them. Also, as said before, no dogs means no dogs. As in zero. Or at least have them leashed at all times, no exceptions. I don't like my tent being marked or having a dog do his business near the hammocks or a kitchen area. Eeww. That all happened.
• The XXL camp t-shirt is at best M size - or am I unable to unzip?

[edit] Weather

• I did not like the heavy rain and on the other days it was way too hot. please change that in the future.
• ACK, it's really time for an open-source-weather-machine
• be better prepared for rain
• Wetter was to Hot and then to much rain ...
• As in southern germany it was raining the whole week and that very hard, we had MUCH luck with the weather. Most of time it was nice. Nothing to complain about.
• Most of the time it was good. Please organize dry wheather on the weekend next time, too.yankee 07:14, 14 August 2007 (CEST)
• I loved the mud (-:
• no complaints here, I enjoyed all of it.

[edit] Transportation

• Our roadtrip was too long for our small, fully loaded car. Please insert a feature next time which allows us to skip or fast-forward some of the German Autobahn... ;-)

• i love german autobahn: 200km/h and more allowed ;-)

• The taxi-drivers sucked... At least some of them were constantly angry with each other and with us, because we did not let them in because there were already 5 taxis waiting,.. Enough people signed up in the transport team to do their job. I would have helped with that too if I had a big car available for shuttling. Anyway: Please not externalize this next time.yankee 07:14, 14 August 2007 (CEST)
  • We had to externalise it for some legal reasons(insurance, "Personenbeförderungsschein"), impossible to do with volunteers. --Fh 19:06, 17 August 2007 (CEST)

Taxi was fine with me, always available without much waiting and sharing the price it was under 4 euro to get back to the train station (less than portion of pasta). The self organized shuttles are great, but not sure if it can beat professional taxi in availability for a last minute ride to catch a train in the middle of the night..

[edit] Feedback from BugBlue

Hello everyone,

as one of the arch angels it was a real cool camp and I really liked it to be there. All the angels did a real great job in making the event happening. Please consider to be an angel next time too. The more people the less work per person should be done.

I arrived on the friday before the camp and I almost got pulled of the train by one of the organizers since they really needed someone to organize the volunteers a little bit. This was the first time I did it so I started without any knowledge. However I did organize some little camps myself already and I've been an angel for many years at camps and congresses. But still distributing the work over about 30 people was a real task and it started to overwhelm me when there where about 150 volunteers all asking if they could do something.

Thanks to a lot of people it went very smooth when the heaven (himmel) got some infrastructure from the NOC and POC. It worked out to function really well.

Since HonkHase throwed himself out of order I got the request to do some security too. This was not really new for me but I still wonder why people don't think signs aren't somewhere for them, why people think that when it's not allowed to climb on 4 bunkers it should be allowed on the 5th bunker.

However at the end everybody so well helped to organize all the things like entrance, infodesks (including NOC helldesk), CERT, lectures, parking lot and archangels it worked so real cool.

I specially have to thank the following people: Capo for being the angel-stockbroker and being friendly to everybody as always, Jeedi for taking care of my job at night, Honkhase for all the support, the organization for their understanding, support and all the nice stuff like the bunker for the angels so we could party cool down and have a great time, webmind for taking care of my job at some daytimes so I could spend some time with my girlfriend, tabascoeye and mc for being an archangel too and of course all the angels who wanted to do the dirtiest work: move all the trash away.

This was also my first time as an volunteer that I didn't feel that I was the one that should be the nicest to all the visitors. I had to make some dissions that didn't statisfy some people because they did some crazy stuff. To let you have some fun I can give you a very small list:

• Putting up the half of a tent on trashcans (we broke up that part of the tent)
• GOING UP ON THE BUNKERS even after we placed signs that it was dangerous
• putting up your tent in front of a container (we move the tent)

However you all did make the job of angels very easy by actually listen to their requests and I hope they all were friendly If you encountered an angel that wasn't friendly it would be propably because he/she had to climb over the red-white tape and tell you that you should go off the shelter.

Some of the people from the organization and crew where halfway overwhelmed how it all worked out to be so nice even after the last day.

I hope you all had a great time, I had and I want to appologize that I was that busy that I hadn't any real time to spend with my friends.

I also have nice whishlist for the next event: - More infrastructure (pallets, brooms, golf-cars, ...) for the angels and visitors who want to help (yes, not everybody who wants to help wants the angel badge... :-() - A quadrocopter with a big radio-megafone so we can ask people in a nice loud way to SHUT THE F*** UP FROM UP THERE - More archangels (please apply in time) - More angels (please apply in time)

I think this was it for now, the other nice stories you will hear at the next party where I am.

BugBlue 11:46, 14 August 2007 (CEST)

Thank you BugBlue, you did a great job! --maha 22:04, 14 August 2007 (CEST)

Just a quick comment: While I perfectly understand your anger and the reason for the signs you set up, I suggest that you use different signs next time. You used a warning sign showing a climbing man. This tells people that climbing at this location may be dangerous, but it does not keep off any self-respecting hacker/geek. Admittedly, unsubstatiated interdictions don't do that either, so you might want to add a written note explaining the reason for such a rule. And finally: props to all you (meta-)angels. -- Relet 23:26, 14 August 2007 (CEST)

A round sign with a red edge is a 'forbidden' sign, not a 'warning' sign. Warning signs are triangular. Like the one with the skull, that was used in conjunction with the 'climbing man' sign, thus explaining the reason for the rule. Moem (who made the signs)

You also try to ask first and do later. Keeps you more healthy normally BugBlue