35C3: Call for Participation and Submission Guidelines

35C3: Call for Participation and Submission Guidelines

EN DE

35C3 – 35th Chaos Communication Congress
December 27. through 30. 2018, Leipziger Exhibition Grounds, Leipzig

There also is a tl;dr-diff to the 34c3 CfP.

The Event

The Chaos Communication Congress is the Chaos Computer Club’s (CCC) annual symposium and hacker party. During four days between Christmas and New Years Eve, thousands of hackers, technology freaks, artists, and utopians get together in Leipzig to communicate, learn from each other, and party together. We focus on topics such as information technology, digital security, making, and breaking. We engage in creative, sceptical discourse on the interaction between technology and society.

We’d love to see your submission for one or more of these tracks:

  • Art & Culture,
  • Ethics, Society & Politics,
  • Hardware & Making,
  • Security,
  • Science und
  • Resilience.

Apart from the official conference program, the Chaos Communication Congress also offers space for community assemblies, developer and project meetings, art installations, lightning talks, and workshops.

Foundation Talks

Congress has grown, a lot. Many of the newcomers have a great thirst for knowledge in areas that may seem mundane and basic to others. This is why we will have a focus this year on talks that convey basic knowledge. These talks will receive a clear signifier, so they are easy to recognise. Foundations talks are not only about technical topics. They can be submitted in all tracks. Every track has a number of reserved talk slots for them. It is important that you have real expertise in the subject you want to talk about and have the ability to make it comprehensible for many people. Please note in the submission what approximate level of previous knowledge is required. Submitting a Foundations Talk will not diminish your chances to get accepted with another talk.

Dates & deadlines

  • October 15th, 2018 (23:59 UTC): Deadline for submissions,
  • November 12th, 2018: Notification of acceptance,
  • December 27th – 30th, 2018: Chaos Communication Congress.

Online submissions only

Please submit your lecture to our conference planning system at https://frab.cccv.de/cfp/35c3.
Simply follow the instructions there. If you have any questions regarding the submission, you are welcome to contact us via mail at 35c3-content(at)cccv.de.

Tracks

Art & Culture

This track awaits submissions that address, from an artistic perspective or with artistic means, the societal changes and contradictions caused by computers, the internet, robots, and general digitalization.

One can create art and beauty with computers: We’re also open to lectures that include art installations, performances, concerts, readings, etc., that involve past, contemporary, or upcoming technologies. We will try to help with the organizational side of such lectures as much as possible.

Ethics, Society & Politics

This track is dedicated to the societal, ethical and political questions posed by technology, networks and the digitization of all aspects of life.

What will our technologically enhanced future look like? What are the effects of machine learning, ubiquitous networks, digitalisation of every thing we do, automation, climate change and globalisation? How does society cope with the resulting social and political upheaval? What commercial and political interests are blocking the way forward to utopias worth living? How can we overcome them? Activist, phantastic, solidaric, and non-commercial ideas and concepts are very welcome. If you shape society with positive energy, this is the track for you. Please speak about your practical experiences!

Hardware & Making

This track is all about developing and creatively using things that allow the digital to make a physical impression.

The focus is on creating things of all kinds of (e.g. textiles, musical instruments, robots, alternative energy, medical tools, …), the expansion, repair, and liberation of proprietary systems (from the decapped smart-card to the firmware of your toaster to a modified agricultural machine), the sovereign use of technology, getting your hands dirty, and all the things we can’t imagine yet – and of course rockets!

Security

For this track we are looking for content demonstrating the influence of security aspects on users and machines. We would therefore like to request technical submissions focusing on security problems and solutions in both, hardware and software.

If you want to share your discoveries with thousands of fellow security enthusiasts, if you have developed new solutions to previously unsolved problems, or if you have found new problems which we knew nothing about, then this is the right track for you.

This year we dedicate some of our slots to beginners and people who are interested in the relevant basics. As part of this year’s foundations initiative, we are also looking for submissions with a loose connection to security. This includes topics from mathematics, networks, operating systems, web technologies, memory (mis)management, cryptography, programming languages, hardware design and other fields.

Science

The rapid development of science and technology is steadily changing our view of the world. But that doesn’t only mean that we’re profiting from new technology as a byproduct. We are also increasingly trying to understand the complex relationship between nature and society, in order to comprehend how our actions parameterize this whole system. We see science as a method of reverse engineering the world API and are interested in the newest diffs. No matter whether research centres, universities, or garage-driven science: if you explore and evaluate interesting and important developments from a scientific standpoint, then send us your submissions!

This year we’re especially interested in submissions regarding the phenomenon of climate change in its whole width and complexity. We are interested in everything from sociocultural effects to frost-resistant measurement technology, from the past to the near future, from the depth of the oceans up to the atmosphere. What are the actual effects of the technical and societal systems we have built? What will be the next Dieselgate, and which active approaches towards solving the problems are there?

Resilience

The world is developing at an increasing pace, and most of it involves computers and algorithms. Unfortunately, those developments do not necessarily equal progress. Some increase complexity; others require waiving freedoms. But many projects already incorporate recent research, like p2p gossipping networks (meaning less data accumulates at central points as everyone runs their own infrastructure), extended OS security (reducing persistence, new policies, virtualisation), or reorganised social frameworks intended to simplify life (by eliminating bureaucracy and sources of stress), and, of course, reduction of our dependency on human competition.

In the resilience track all submissions are welcome that lead to a world more worthy of living in – be they long-running projects or recent developments.

Classifiers

As a courtesy to reviewers and your audience, we would like you to also rate your submission by dynamic tags we call “classifiers”. Those help us to better understand the content and what your audience can expect. If, for example, your topics cover both hardware and security, you now can show us on a scale between 0 and 100 per cent – making the classic “tracks” much more fluid. You can also tell us what level of prior knowledge you expect your audience to bring.

Further Program at the 35C3

Lightning talks

Got something interesting to say but don’t want to submit a full talk? Consider doing a lightning talk instead. You will have five minutes to present your idea or project, or to do a rant. A formal submission through frab is not required; as usual, the lightning talks are organized via the public wiki. Lightning talks can be held in German or English and will be streamed, recorded and published (see below).

Assemblies

Assemblies are places where communities around a certain interest can meet, talk, exchange ideas and be inspired. Assemblies play a huge part in creating the special “congress atmosphere.” They are comparable to villages at the Chaos Communication Camp. We will have lots of space, so some bigger installations will be possible.

To further the exchange and the get-together of communities and groups, we will cluster the assemblies at the 35C3 along key subjects. We will link these key subjects to bigger workshop areas / stages / auditoriums which will be available for the assemblies connected to the subject for workshops, self-organized sessions or after talks discussion.

You and your community are interested in adopting a key subject, or your established assembly wants to take care of more space? Then write an email to c3-assemblies@lists.ccc.de and join the effort to create a great congress. Installations with up to 30m² big roofs are possible!

The usual application for assemblies will happen in due time at the public wiki.

For projects, installations, workshops, sessions hosted in assemblies and other fun stuff

A formal submission through frab is not required. There will be a wiki page to keep track of requirements for space and other resources. Simply start already considering now what you would like to make, bring, or show, and write it down once the wiki goes online. We are open to crazy and surprising stuff.

Submission guidelines

Please send us a description of your suggested talk that is as complete as possible. The description is the central criteria for acceptance or rejection, so please ensure that it is as clear and complete as possible. Quality comes before quantity. Due to the non-commercial nature of the event, presentations which aim to market or promote commercial products or entities will be rejected without consideration.

Since most participants find – or don’t find a lecture by its title, it’s important to keep it precise, accessible and comprehensible. Our teams will keep a keen eye on title and subtitle and make suggestions to change them if necessary, so please avoid insider jokes and stereotypes. It would be a shame if we would have to reject an otherwise excellent submission because the title does not tell much about the actual content.

As it is likely that there will be multiple submissions on the same topic, please show us exactly why your talk should be part of the conference. Remember that the teams are diversely staffed, and not every reviewer knows every submitter and their background. Please write something about yourself, your research, and your motivation. It does not matter if the talk has been held at another conference somewhere on this planet, as long as it is up to date and relevant.

Talks should be either 30 minutes long plus 10 minutes for questions and answers or 45 minutes long plus 15 minutes for questions and answers. Longer slots are possible if absolutely necessary, but should be an exception. Please take our limited amount of presentation time into consideration, check how much time you really need to bring home your points and then tell us the proposed length of your talk.

Language

Although the Chaos Communication Congress is an international event and a lot of content is presented in English, there will again be a translation team that will simultaneously translate most German talks into English. So if you are not comfortable with presenting in English, don’t hesitate to present your lecture in German. If your talk will be held in English, your submission should also be in English.

Publication

Audio and video recordings of the lectures will be published in various formats under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. This license allows commercial use of excerpts by media institutions as part of their reporting. If you do not wish for material from your lecture to be published or streamed, please let us know in your submission.

Note: As German law (and therefore the license) might differ from the law of your country, please let us know if you have any issues or questions regarding the exact implications. Unfortunately, we can’t guarantee a perfect translation.

Travel, costs & visa

The Chaos Communication Congress is a non-commercial event where neither the organisers nor the speakers are being paid. As an accepted speaker for a full talk, you get free admission, though. If necessary, we are able to provide limited support for travel costs. If you need help applying for a visa, such as an official invitation to present to the German embassy, please make sure to let the content team know well in advance. Please be aware that the visa application procedure may take up to six weeks.

Bild von HDValentin.