Assemblies

We want you to bring more of that Camp feeling to the Congress! The event suffered from stagnation over the past few years. This time you can shape the conference a lot more than you already did in Berlin. To start that transformation, there’ll be a new thing called Assemblies. Ideally, these should work much like Villages on the Camp, but not exactly the same way.

Up to 28C3 last year we’ve assigned seats and tables to projects that registered in the wiki beforehand. Space has been a very scarce resource, thus we had to keep a close eye on allocation. Hopefully, that will change for the better in the CCH. Naturally we can’t guarantee this, because we don’t know how many people will come there. It might turn out that we can realize only some parts of what we dream of. It is an experiment, and as such may as well result in failure.

So what exactly shall those Assembly things be?

In contrast to projects on past Congresses, which have been centered around the work that people do, Assemblies focus on social groups of people. Obviously there will still be projects, but they’ll rather be parts of an Assembly than stand alone. If you are a group of hackers who like to work and hang out together, you might consider setting up a home base on 29C3. Bring your toys, work on projects, have fun and let others participate in what you’re doing! That’s what an Assembly is all about.

Assemblies are also invited to decorate their spot on the Congress as long as everything you bring with you does not block exit paths and is not inflammable. These two requirements are important, and if your installations don’t fulfill them, we’ll be forced to remove them.

Last but not least, letting others participate in what you know – and what you’re doing – is central for everything going on at the conference. We want you to share your knowledge and thus we’d like to try something. If people in your Assembly want to offer workshops or maybe lectures on a small scale, maybe there’ll be enough space for you to integrate a workshop area into your Assembly. We will not provide projectors, canvas or anything apart from chairs and tables, but probably you’ve got those anyway. But please, don’t bring PAs or other sound systems, since your neighbors won’t like the cacophony of a dozen Assemblies around playing all kinds of different music.

If you would like to have small-scale workshops in your Assembly, tell us what you’re planning and for how many people. Please be as specific as possible. We will probably not allocate extra workshop space for your Assembly, if you haven’t published something like a schedule on your Assembly page. For now it will be sufficient to list topics and speakers, later we’d like to see a timetable as well.

So, that’s the general idea. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to reach that ideal inside a building. The place is big, okay, but still limited. As a consequence, we’ll probably be forced to monitor and adjust allocation of space to the individual Assemblies. So we need you to inform us about what you’d like to do, how much space you’ll need, what you’d like to bring with you, how much power your gear will consume, etc…

The conference wiki, which will go public soon, makes use of semantic wiki data. We’re currently still working out some aspects related to information about Assemblies, but once we’re done you should create a wiki page describing your Assembly and tell us all we need to know. The more you tell us about your plans the better your chances that you’ll actually get what you want. Even though you won’t be able to enter that information into the wiki right from the start, please start thinking about it now. We’ll inform you once we’re done with creating all those semantic forms and templates.

For bigger workshops there will be workshop rooms. So if you’re planning to work with a group of let’s say 20 people, you’ll probably want reserve a time slot there. We will soon post a howto on doing this.

You’d better start planning for your Assembly now. Participate and share with others! The Congress is made by you, so help making it what you think it should be.