Real soon now: Fahrplan-Release

The 34C3 Congress schedule (Fahrplan) needs proper planning and is an incredibly complex task. And it’s all about you: Offering over 500 submissions, sharing your knowledge and important political and technical insights for free. We’re using sophisticated tools, and a lot of manual work to end up with a well-planned schedule. You helped not just with providing your preferences on talks you want to see, but also by practical tool improvement: Our conference planning system frab just saw a donation of a 5000+ lines patch with a French translation.

Sharing your preferences in the halfnarp helped a lot to model a Fahrplan that reduces all kinds of conflicts as much as possible. You examined more than 160 confirmed lectures in six content tracks – all in all 130 hours of program. And over 4,000 votes were clicked via halfnarp this year. So, thank you very much!

To give you a little insight into what it means to create a good schedule, we would like to share some of the constraints and parameters that needed to be taken into consideration: Half- and one-hour-slots don’t easily add up to an even batch of lectures; we need at least fifteen minutes breaks between lectures. Some speakers have kids and can’t present in the night or are not available on all days. Others just don’t function properly in the hours before noon or late in the evening, due to personal time zones, jet lag or partying.

There are also some speakers that don’t feel comfortable in huge halls, even though they are in high demand. Some presenters are prone to overrun their time, some events need stage setup times. For our foreign audience we want to have not only German language lectures running in parallel. For catering to all content interests, we needed to spread out all our six content tracks as evenly as possible. And so on…

Icing on the cake: Some speakers with security background exploited a bug in frab to quietly upgrade their lecture to 1h15min after acceptance (but we got you!).

Inspecting some of the correlations revealed by your halfnarp-votes left us speechless, others happy: You seem to understand that bitcoin is bad for the environment, „Cryptocurrencies“ correlates highly with „Climate change! What do we know?“ after all. We’re a little concerned what the high correlation between „Influencing decisions with AI“ and „Hacking real estate markets“ means for the future – and would like to remind you of the hacker ethics.

Some of the new features that were useful for planning will flow back into the halfnarp calendar view: You will be able to use correlations to find related talks to the one you liked.

So, once the Fahrplan is released real soon now: Before complaining always remember that it has been your decisions, and everything else is the AI’s fault!

Bild: Tasmo, CC BY-SA 2.0.