Presale on CCC Event Blog

FSCK 2026 – Episode IV in Backnang

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200

The Chaostreff Backnang proudly presents: FSCK 2026 – Episode IV

Overview

Start: 8 May 2026, 16:00
End: 10 May 2026, 18:00
Genre: Hacking & Networking Event
Venue: Kino Universum, Sulzbacher Straße 32, 71522 Backnang (OpenStreetMap)
Admission price: 56 €

Plot

Grab some popcorn and settle into your seat: FSCK Episode IV is coming to the Universum Cinema in Backnang on 8–10 May 2026! Enjoy exciting talks, hang out at the Hackcenter, and find out what goes on behind the scenes at a movie theater. Rumour has it there will also be an exclusive film screening …

You’ll have the chance to hack and network freely at the Hackcenter. You can also listen to talks in a real cinema setting – and you’ll even have the opportunity to deliver your own talk in style, right in a real movie theater. That way, your talk will be a huuuge success. Proposals can be submitted until 12 April 2026, 23:23 via the CfP. We also welcome workshop submissions!

Ticket Sales

Tickets for FSCK will be available starting 5 April 2026, 18:00 in our ticket shop.

Breaking news about FSCK will be posted on our event page and on the Fediverse.

We look forward to seeing many of you here!

Secure your eye-catching Congress merch now!

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The word’s on the street that you can now stock up on amazing cloth in the official 39C3 look at our merch store.

In addition to the traditional black, this year’s shirts, zippers, hoodies, and sweatshirts are also available in spring-like shades of misty jade, lavender, and natural raw, in joyful anticipation of future camps. And to top it all off, you can adorn your heads with 39C3-themed embroidered beanies and your kids’ necks with uber-nerdy bibs. And for those who want to shine with subtle hacker shibboleth textiles even in formal settings, there is a lovingly embroidered heavy shirt in black or natural raw – but only while supplies last.

To find out in advance whether this year’s textiles will fit you, you can find comparative measurements for many other hacker events from last year in the Merch Size Comparison Guide.

And as usual, here’s the fine print: You have until December 20th to place your order. Please only order if you have a way to actually receive the goods. This means that you either have a ticket for 39C3, or someone with a ticket can receive the goods for you upon presentation of the pickup code. You have until 10:00 p.m. on day 2 (2025-12-28T22:00:00+01:00) to do so. In legal terms, this is called a forward transaction. After that, the clothes will go back on sale to the general public and we will only be able to distribute them according to availability.

And now, without further ado, click and order to your heart’s content!

39C3 Presale: Modus Operandi

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to finally announce the presale for this year’s Chaos Communication Congress. It will work pretty much the same as last year:

We’ll again be using our system of replicating vouchers. The presale will run in two phases: the voucher phase and the open sale.
We’ll explain this as briefly as we can here. If you want to read more about it, we also have a documentation page available, where we’ll add more information in the coming days.

The voucher phase will run from 2025-10-21 until 2025-11-12 and works as follows:

There is a fixed quota for this phase. Once this quota is reached, no more tickets will be sold until the open sale.
All Chaos community groups that have received vouchers from us in the past and answer our inquiry email (see below) will again receive a set of vouchers this year. Each voucher allows the purchase of one ticket. Once this ticket is paid for, a new voucher will be generated (roughly once per day, and only on days when the banks are processing payments). This chain of vouchers will continue until either the quota is reached or the voucher phase ends. These vouchers are intended to be shared within the group and its extended community. It is up to the respective groups how exactly they handle this.
At the same time, all 38C3 angels who have worked at least 15 hours will receive one voucher. This voucher guarantees the purchase of one ticket until 2025-11-12, even if the quota is reached before then. If you redeem your angel voucher and pay for your ticket while there are still tickets available in the voucher phase, you will receive one additional voucher you can share with a friend. This additional voucher does not generate further vouchers.

Following the voucher phase, there will be two open sale dates, where tickets will be sold at tickets.events.ccc.de. The open sale can be A LOT for newcomers, so you might want to read the guide that we’ll publish in the coming days.
For each date, there is a fixed quota. That means that if the first date sells out, there will still be tickets available on the second date. The dates are:

2025-11-08, Saturday, 11:00 Uhr (CET)
2025-11-17, Monday, 20:00 Uhr (CET)

We’ve been thinking for many years about how to structure congress admission pricing. Most importantly, we want the broadest possible segments of the community and society to have access to the event. At the same time, we want to keep resisting purely capitalist number-go-up logic. Nevertheless, we need to cover the actual costs of running a large event. We can compensate for this to some degree with the help of the impressive lived solidarity from our community: Roughly a third of you consistently chip in the extra euros for Supporter Tickets on top of standard ticket prices.

The Supporter Tickets—and the huge amount of volunteer work involved in Congress, especially from our angels—continue to enable us to accommodate those for whom money for a Congress ticket is harder to come by. This year, as always, a team of angels will handle requests from all those who request access to a Friends Ticket.

We used every lever available to us over the past two years to avoid making congress more expensive for you on top of all the other price increases in your lives. However, we can no longer escape general inflation this year. As you know, we run the Congresses close to the edge of economic viability—but we still need reserves for future Congresses and Camps, and must offset increased prices for venue rental, technology, materials, and staff. Therefore, we have to raise ticket prices this year, which you can view in the ticket shop.

The most important changes:

Standard ticket: ~~€ 175~~ € 190
Supporter-Tickets:
- ~~€ 200~~ € 220
- ~~€ 235~~ € 255
- ~~€ 270~~ € 300

All Chaos community groups will receive an email today to their last known contact address. If you did not receive this email, please contact us at 39c3-tickets@cccv.de by 2025-10-20. In case we have missed an entire group that, in your opinion, should be represented at Congress and is not connected with any other local groups, please also reach out to us at 39c3-tickets@cccv.de. (Please note that groups that are close to each other, either by location or organisation, are expected to share their vouchers – if we started handling more than one group per city/area, we’d have a full-time job on our hands.) Chaos community groups will receive their vouchers on October 21.

All angels who according to Engelsystem have worked more than 15 hours and have given us permission to contact them via email will receive their voucher today. You’re sure you passed the 15-hour threshold, but did not receive a voucher? Please contact us at 39c3-tickets@cccv.de and make sure to include the login name and email address you used at 38C3.

See you soon!
Your 39C3 presale team

You can’t have enough pre-sales!

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: For 38C3 you have again the possibility to avoid long queues at the congress shirt queue by buying now. We are again organizing the merch presale as a forward transaction (Termingeschäft), so the merchandise must be picked up during the event at the CCH by December 28, 10:00 pm. So only buy if you already have a ticket for the congress! The presale closes on December 20.

In long form: The merch pre-sales of the last two events have turned out to be a practical way for us and you to secure your memorabilia in the cut and color of your choice from the comfort of your computer at home and then have it handed out stress-free at the Congress by the bustling angels of the Fashion Operation Center.

For 38C3, we’re treating ourselves and you to a slightly broader range: for all those who like to wear feminine textiles, this year there’s a choice between T-shirts in a “fitted” cut and cozy, dinner-ready T-shirt dresses with a subtle print. Friends of warmer garments, who have no use for the previously unavoidable hoodies, will this time find a lovingly subtly embroidered pullover - with no hoodie in sight - ideal for wearing to formal occasions. And for sporting activities and leisurely lounging at home, we present a special edition of sweatpants with a 38C3 print - so that you can also proudly flaunt your nerdy identity in the gym!

You have until December 20th to order. Please only order if you have a way of actually receiving the goods, i.e. you either have a ticket for 38C3 or someone with a ticket can pick up the goods for you after presenting the pick-up code. You have until 22:00 on day 2 (2024-12-28T22:00:00+01:00) to do this. In legal terms, this is called a Termingeschäft. After that date, the clothes go back on sale and we can only issue them subject to availability.

Of course, there will be a sale of sufficient Congress shirts without pre-order at 38C3 for all those who absolutely want to feel and try them on before buying, but we cannot predict availability or waiting times there. If it becomes apparent that certain textiles are already running out in the pre-sale, we will try to reorder them.

Enough said … now hop over to the ticket system and order your congress merch!

Image CC BY oatsy40

38C3 Presale: Modus Operandi

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’re happy to finally announce the presale for this year’s Chaos Communication Congress. It will work slightly differently than last year:

Just like in the past, our presale aims to make sure that both the active core of our community and newcomers can join and shape 38C3. By “active core”, we mean the volunteers/angels who are dedicating their time to make Congress possible and awesome, as well as the many local and regional groups of the Chaos community who each contribute their own perspectives and interests to Congress.

This year, we’re returning to our system of replicating vouchers, which you may remember from pre-pandemic events: The presale will be run in two phases: the voucher phase and the open sale.
We’ll explain this briefly (well, as briefly as we can) here, but if you want to read more about it, we also have a documentation page available.

The voucher phase will run from 2024-10-22 until 2024-11-11 and works as follows:

There is a fixed quota for this phase. Once this quota is reached, no more tickets will be sold until the open sale.
All Chaos community groups that have received vouchers from us in the past will each receive a set of vouchers. Each voucher allows the purchase of one ticket. Once this ticket is paid for, a new voucher will be generated (roughly once per day, and only on days when the banks are processing payments). This chain of vouchers will continue until either the quota is reached or the voucher phase ends. These vouchers are intended to be shared within the group and its extended community – how exactly this is handled is up to the respective groups.
At the same time, all 37C3 angels who have worked at least 15 hours will receive one voucher. This voucher guarantees the purchase of a ticket until 2024-11-11, even if the quota is reached before then. If you redeem your angel voucher and pay for your ticket while there are still tickets available in the voucher phase, you will receive one additional voucher that you can share with a friend. This additional voucher does not generate further vouchers.

Following the voucher phase, there will be three open sale dates, where tickets will be sold at tickets.events.ccc.de. The open sale can be A LOT for newcomers, so you might want to read last year’s guide just to be safe.
For each date, there is a fixed quota, so if the first date sells out, there will still be tickets available on the second date. The dates are:

2024-11-12, Tuesday, 20:00 (CET)
2024-11-17, Sunday, 16:00 (CET)
2024-11-23, Saturday, 11:00 (CET)

Ticket prices remain unchanged, and you can view them in the ticket shop.

All Chaos community groups will receive an email today to their last known contact address. Please check if you have received this email, and contact us at 38c3-tickets@cccv.de by 2024-10-21 otherwise. If we have missed an entire group that, in your opinion, should be represented at Congress and is not connected with any other local groups, please also reach out to us at 38c3-tickets@cccv.de. (Please note that groups that are close to each other, either by location or organisation, are expected to share their vouchers – if we started handling more than one group per city/area, we’d have a full-time job on our hands.) You will get your vouchers at the same time as the angels on October 22nd.

All angels who have worked more than 15 hours and have given us permission to contact them via email will receive their voucher on October 22nd. If you haven’t received an email from us by October 23rd, but are sure you have reached the 15-hour threshold, please contact us at 38c3-tickets@cccv.de and make sure to include your login name and email address.

See you soon!
Your 38C3 presale team

37C3 pre-sale is dead, long live pre-sale!

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: In preparation for the upcoming 37C3 you have the opportunity to buy your favourite merch right now without having to wait in line later. The goods MUST be collected at the event in the CCH by 28 December 22:00, so only go shopping if you already have a ticket for 37C3! The pre-sale ends on 20 December.

Our 37C3 ticket pre-sale is over and we are speechless and happy about the solidarity in our community! An overwhelming amount of attendees grabbed supporter and business tickets and pushed the average price to currently well over 190 € and right into our congress piggy bank. Thanks to this buffer, we can now approve the “Friends” requests with a much lighter heart and have room for more chic installations, decorations and cassettes for punk-rock späti.

To make sure you will bring home as many great memories from the event, we want to get our amazing Congress merch into as many of your hands as possible. And to make this as painless as possible, you can already shop around for clothes exactly your size and desired colour in this year’s merch pre-sale and then pick them up at your leisure at 37C3. You have until 22:00 on day 2 (2023-12-28T22:00:00+01:00) to do so. In legal terms, this is called a “Termingeschäft”. After that, the clothes go back on sale for everyone and we can only issue your goods subject to availability.

Merch will of course be sold at the Congress as usual, but you may have to queue and your favourite cut, the right size or colour may be sold out. We will try to re-order sold-out merchandise, but cannot guarantee that everything will still be available in all sizes at 37C3.

The not so fine print

In order to be able to process all payments, the pre-sale closes on 20 December 2023 just before midnight and the payment deadline is 22 December 2023. This is a hard deadline that we cannot negotiate because the bank simply does not process payments over the holidays. Please refrain from trying to do this somehow - our pre-sale angels would have to painstakingly return late payments one by one.

37C3: Tickets & Presale

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It’s finally time: After a lot of work, we’re ready to announce the presale for this year’s Chaos Communication Congress. Read on for all the information – ticket prices, sale dates, and more minutiae than anyone would like to read:

Ticket prices

Our ticket prices this year are

Standard Ticket: €175
Supporter Ticket: starting at €200
Business Ticket: starting at €550
Up-and-coming Ticket (U18): €45 (free for children under the age of 12)
Member Ticket (for members of CCC e.V.): €160

As always, we’re also additionally offering Friends Tickets: People who cannot afford the Standard Ticket can instead request a Friends Ticket at a reduced price (the exact price to be determined individually in a conversation with the ticket team).

We think it’s important to offer the Friends Ticket and the Up-and-coming Ticket. However, this will lower our average ticket price. For reference, we need to average a ticket price of €180 to meet our budget. That’s why we’d like to ask you to buy the Supporter Ticket, if you can, despite the price hike compared to 36C3. And if your employer is paying for the ticket, please buy a Business Ticket (only Business Ticket owners will receive their invoice prior to the event). It’s only thanks to Supporter and Business tickets that we can offer Friends tickets in the first place.

Just like in previous years, we’ll publish the average ticket price continuously in the ticket shop, starting after the first presale date.

Presale dates

The tickets will be available for sale at tickets.events.ccc.de on the following dates:

2023-11-23 21:00 (CET): only with a voucher
2023-11-26 14:00 (CET): only with a voucher
2023-11-29 20:00 (CET)
2023-12-02 15:00 (CET)

For the first two dates, you will need a voucher to buy tickets. Please refer to our blog post for information regarding the voucher system. Vouchers will be sent out throughout today.

Angel vouchers are valid until 2023-11-30 23:59 CET and can be redeemed outside the presale dates.

How To: Presale

The 37C3 presale can be pretty stressful, so here are is an overview of what to expect for those who have not experienced one yet (or can’t remember after such a long time). Everybody else can stop reading here – you’ve made it!

First off: There’s typically a big rush, especially on the first presale dates. It’s important to be really on time – more to the second than to the minute.
At first, you will see a captcha. The captcha usually requires a click on a picture, a selection option, a button, or some other simple action. (A misclick is not a problem, you can try again!)
After the captcha, you will be placed in the queue. Your position in the queue will be displayed – the page occasionally reloads to update your position. It’s also fine to reload the page yourself; you won’t lose your spot.
Now, you wait. The queue moves slowly – not so much to protect our servers, and more so that tickets that are only put into the shopping cart (but not bought) can become available again.
Once through the queue, you will be redirected to the ticket shop. Here you have the following options:

a) At one of the first two presale dates: Enter your voucher.
b) Next (or immediately, at the other two presale dates), you can put up to two tickets into the shopping cart. This limitation ensures that no one just buys a huge amount of tickets and then runs away laughing.
c) If you want to apply for a Friends Ticket, then instead click on the corresponding (big, colorful) button. You don’t need to enter your voucher code first. You then have 10 minutes to write a brief request (just a summary of your situation and how much you could pay for a ticket). The request doesn’t have to be long, but maybe it’s more relaxing if you have prepared this text in advance. After submitting, you are done: The Friends Team will contact you soon after.
Everyone else can now proceed to the checkout. The shopping cart is valid for ten minutes, so don’t dawdle!
Payment methods available are bank transfer and credit card payment (via Stripe). Credit cards are evil and cost us a lot of money, that’s why we ask that you consider covering the additional payment fees. The payment method can also be changed after completing your order. So if you’re experiencing problems with the credit card payment, you can also first choose payment by bank transfer to complete your order.

If you have any questions after reading this wall of text, please refer to our FAQ. If that doesn’t help, please contact us via email.

37C3 Presale: Modus Operandi

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’re preparing for the 37C3 presale, which will work slightly differently than in the past:

Just like in previous years, we want to make sure that the active heart of our community – the people who shape Congress – can make 37C3 awesome again. Since our events are run entirely by volunteers, this first and foremost includes our angels (volunteers) who dedicate their free time and effort to make the event possible in the first place. It also encompasses all the hackspaces and activist groups who contribute to the Chaos community both during 37C3 and throughout the year.

At the same time, it’s important to us that we provide an opportunity for newcomers to come to 37C3 and get to know and join our community!

However, even our core community has outgrown the CCH in Hamburg, which will be our Congress venue. While that is fantastic in many ways, it does also mean that we can’t guarantee that everybody who wants to attend will be able to.

Our previous system, which used a mechanism of replicating vouchers, can’t be used this year: Replicating vouchers require quite a bit of time to function (they have to be redeemed, paid for, and then passed on). Due to our move to Hamburg and the fact we were all busy with Camp during summer, we simply no longer have that time. Instead, there’ll be a slightly modified presale process:

All 36C3 Angels who clocked in at least 20 hours will receive 2 vouchers, each of which is valid for the purchase of a ticket within a timeframe of approximately two weeks. If you receive an angel voucher, you’ll have that time period to purchase your ticket, which will be reserved for you during that time.
All Chaos community groups that have received vouchers from us in the past will each receive one voucher, granting access to the two first presale dates. During these presale dates, the first-come-first-served principle applies until that round’s tickets are sold. This voucher can and should be shared within your extended group. Each of these vouchers allows the purchase of a large – but not unlimited! – number of tickets, so it’s advisable to not just share them on Twitter. However, who you share this voucher with is ultimately up to you.
Finally, there will be two more presale dates that are open to everybody. Each presale date is allocated its own quota of tickets, so there will definitely be tickets available for general sale.

All Chaos community groups will receive an email today to their last known contact address. Please check if you have received this email, and contact us at 37c3-tickets@cccv.de by 2023-10-25 otherwise. If we have missed an entire group that, in your opinion, should be represented at Congress and is not connected with any other local groups, please also reach out to us at 37c3-tickets@cccv.de. (Please note that groups that are close to each other, either by location or organisation, are expected to share their vouchers – if we started handling more than one group per city/area, we’d have a full-time job on our hands.)

All angels who have worked more than 20 hours and have given us permission to contact them via email will be contacted by us today (letting them know they will receive vouchers soon). If you receive no email from us and think it is more likely that the email got lost than that you did not reach 20 hours, please contact us at 37c3-tickets@cccv.de and tell us your Engelsystem name, the email address you used back then, and any other context that might be helpful.

We’ll have another blog post for you as soon as we know the presale dates and ticket prices. The actual vouchers will also be sent out at that time – please be patient until then!

See you soon!
Your 37C3 presale team

MRMCD 2023: Ticketverkauf gestartet

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Dear friends of fact-checking,

we guarantee this is not fake: The sale of tickets and merch for this year’s MRMCD (“Who owns reality?”) has begun at https://presale.mrmcd.net/mrmcd/2023/. We made five kinds of ticket available, hoping one of them matches your financial reality. We recommend you create precedents during the presale since obtaining a ticket at the box office might be unrealistic. Furthermore, our environmentally certified t-shirts and hoodies, printed by a social institution, are only available during the pre-sale.

We also welcome submissions for talks about a diverse set of topics: What is the actual reality of data protection? Is privacy still more than fiction? Does AI create an alternative reality? What’s going on with e-government, fake news, deep fakes, machine learning, or AI and copyright? Please submit your ideas until 30.07.2023 at https://talks.mrmcd.net/2023/cfp.

Any questions left? Contact us at chatbot (at) mrmcd.net

Yours truly,
the MRMCD2023 fact-checkers

About the event:

The MetaRheinMainChaosDays (MRMCD) is a regularly held conference of the Chaos Computer Club since 2004. It is organized by the non-profit MRMCD e.V. in collaboration with local hackerspaces, CCC groups, and nearby universities. The conference will take place on the first weekend of September 2023 (01 - 03.09.2023) at the Piloty Building (S2|02) of TU Darmstadt.

Every year, the organizing team chooses a new motto and event design, but the conference always focuses on updates and developments in the field of IT security. Just like in previous years, there will be round-the-clock breakfast provisions available for all attendees.

Camp 2023 – Last Call for Camp Tickets

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The most important bit up front: We will release more tickets, to be sold starting tomorrow, July 11th, 20:00 CEST!

After the last round of ticket sales, we had an unusually large amount of orders that were never paid. Combined with an average ticket price of EUR 376.29 that remained noticeably below our goal of EUR 380, we had hoped for both a fuller camp ground and a less uncomfortable budget. (Remember, we shared our budget and the reason for our ticket prices here.

If we don’t sell out completely on Tuesday, we’ll continue to run a normal presale until all tickets are gone or until Camp begins.

But we also have good news: Over the course of the three presale dates, we managed to increase the production of this year’s flow3r badge. The second and the third presale date therefore had sufficient badges available for everybody, whereas some people who bought their tickets in the first round couldn’t order a badge. These people will receive an email (some time today) with a voucher code that will allow them to purchase a badge, also starting on July 11th, 20:00 CEST. (Badges are of course still limited, so we can’t promise there will be enough for everybody who receives this email.)

Camper van tickets are still sold out.

Looking forward to seeing you in Mildenberg!

Camp 2023 – Merch presale

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0200

Get your camp souvenirs in your size now!

For this Chaos Communication Camp, we want to give you the opportunity to buy t-shirts, hoodies, zippers and other camp memorabilia in advance. This is an experiment to make it easier for you to collect clothes of your taste and in your size at the stall later on - without having to wait in the queue for hours shooting fearful glimpse at the residual stock indicator. What’s more, you don’t have to hold on to your scarce cash holdings at the event to buy textiles, but can spend it on drinks and craft kits to your heart’s content.

The pre-sale enables us to produce more precisely, to better estimate the distribution of sizes and the interest in the designs, and thus to avoid costly stock-keeping and tedious taking of inventories of unsold clothes later on. Since we organise the sales in a very small team completely on a voluntary basis, we have no resources for complex shipping and returns organisation. Big companies and commercial festivals can compensate for the risk of over-producing by charging higher prices - we, on the other hand, want to also give the financially less well-padded members of the Chaos family the opportunity to go home with a long-lasting souvenir of the event.

We are happy to pass the savings on to you by offering the merch a few euros cheaper when purchased in advance.

You can find the merch shop at the following URL: https://tickets.events.ccc.de/camp2023-merch/.

Note: You will need to come and get your merch!

After paying for your order and downloading the corresponding QR code from our presale system, you can use it at the camp itself to pick up your merchandise until August 17 2023 at 22:00 (day 3) - this also means that you should only order if you’ve already secured a ticket for the camp or know someone who can pick up the t-shirts for you. However, in return, we have to insist that you actually pick up the previously purchased goods by day 3. In the language of the lawyers, this is called a forward contract. After that, your claim to the textile expires and we try to offer it for sale to other participants. Until the end of the camp, we can only offer you the goods according to availability. For logistical reasons, we cannot ship the merchandise after the camp.

That being said, we don’t want to rip you off: If there are unforeseen circumstances preventing you from fulfilling the “get your merch” part of the contract, will try to find a fair solution.

Besides sporting an amazing design, the textiles are eco-organic certified, durable and, according to our experience, have a great cut. If you have bought memorabilia from us at Congresses or rc3 in recent years, you know that we don’t buy cheap stuff and you already know what sizes will probably fit you. We will also link the manufacturer’s size charts for all items of clothing in our presale system.

To ensure that you can keep a clear head when ordering the camp tickets without being distracted by what merch you should buy, the presale for camp merchandise starts one day after the first ticket pre-sale, i.e. on 7 June, and ends one day after the last round of ticket sales, i.e. on June 25. We can not accept later pre-orders - after all, we have to order the raw material for the print shop at some point.

Of course, we will also offer some products at the camp itself that have not been pre-ordered. You can use them to stock up on the souvenirs you bought in advance - only while stocks last, of course.

Camp 2023 – Presale

Mon, 29 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Finally, we have all the solid facts we need to kick off ticket sales. Here we go:

Dates

As announced previously, we’ll have three presale dates for admissions tickets. All times are in CEST:

Tuesday, 6.6., 21:00
Monday, 12.6., 15:00
Saturday, 24.6., 12:00 (noon)

The ticket shop will be available at tickets.events.ccc.de, and if we failed to answer any questions in the following post, we’re happy to help at camp2023-tickets@cccv.de.

As always: be on time!

Tickets

What are we even selling there? More than you’d think! Apart from the usual admission tickets at various prices, we also have:

Parking tickets. Parking your car will require a ticket this year. This way, we pass the costs for the parking area to those who use them, and hopefully encourage carsharing and a switch to other options. Since we don’t know the exact size of the parking area available at this point, the parking tickets won’t be on sale yet. Once they become available, we’ll notify you here on events.ccc.de, and will also send an email to everybody who has already bought a ticket. The price for a parking spot is currently planned to be € 40. For those arriving by train, we are planning to offer free shuttle buses to the train stations in Zehdenick and Gransee which will also stop at supermarkets. They will run at least during the event days and their schedule will be adjusted to the regional train lines. More details will be published once they are available.

Camper tickets. For those arriving with a camper van, there are very limited tickets available at € 100 per camper van. Since camping vehicles require us to build additional infrastructure and we only have very limited area available, camping vehicles without a camper ticket will not be admitted to the event site.

Badges. We’ll also have an electronic badge again! It’s can play music, blink, and it’s beautiful. We have fewer badges than tickets available, so there will be a maximum of one badge per person and the badge must be reserved online during the ticket purchase. The reservation price is € 32. The battery is compatible with the MCH2022 badge, and can be added for € 4.20. We’ll have more badge info for you soon here on events.ccc.de.

Prices

In order to break even, we need to reach an average ticket price of € 380. This will also be the price of our Standard Ticket.

There is also a heavily discounted ticket available for € 75 for people aged between 12 and 18 (children aged 11 and under do not require a ticket). Additionally, there will be an opportunity to apply for a Friends ticket if you are unable to afford the regular ticket. This option will be available during the announced presale dates, as long as there are tickets available.

However! These discounted tickets naturally lower our average ticket price. That’s why we kindly ask you, to consider purchasing a Supporter ticket starting at € 450 to help finance the discounted tickets, if that’s possible for you. You can also enter any other ticket price above € 380. We are also offering Business tickets again, priced at € 599 and € 899. We particularly encourage those who have their participation in the camp financially supported by their employers to support us with the Business tickets. Only with the Business tickets will you receive an invoice prior to the camp.

We will publish a graph of the average ticket price throughout the presale, so you’ll have the same information we do on how the presale is going.

Appendix: Pricing explanation

As you probably noticed, the ticket prices are significantly higher than at the last Chaos Communication Camp. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, looking at inflation levels over the course of the last four years, but we want to use this occasion to introduce more transparency in our pricing, and give you a little peek into the – very preliminary – budget.

As Camp is mainly run by volunteers, we don’t need to pay a lot of staff. The overwhelming part of our expenses goes into building the basic infrastructure that we’ll all take for granted, but that usually doesn’t exist at the Camp site. For example, 39% of the ticket price are used for sanitary facilities, power, and light. Another 23% go towards containers, tents, stages, woodworking, furniture, and construction machinery required for buildup.

Here are all current parts of our budget. The only parts that are not included are budget positions that are not financed through ticket sales but through separate channels, such as beverages or t-shirts.

Area	Amount
Sanitary facilities	437,663 €
Power	324,930 €
Containers and tents	244,696 €
Light	209,083 €
Decoration	178,907 €
Production (Staff, radio, travel, etc.)	174,090 €
Catering	150,000 €
Sound, stages	110,554 €
Safety (firefighter department, ambulance, security, etc.)	94,603 €
Woodworking	93,378 €
Vehicles (construction machines etc.)	83,038 €
Land (rent and utilities)	77,769 €
Waste	59,500 €
Furniture	53,594 €
Materials transport	43,800 €
Passenger transport	29,325 €
Other	126,656 €

Total expenses: 2,491,591 €

Camp 2023 – Prepresale

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Chaos Communication Camp 2023 presale is not ready to start quite yet, but we have some information for those who are eagerly waiting. Short and sweet:

We’re as impatient as you, but before the presale can start, we need a ticket price, and before we can figure out the ticket price, we need to get our budget planning done, so please bear with us a bit longer.
Tickets will definitely be more expensive than four years ago, to nobody’s surprise.
As always, there will be the option to apply for a Friends Ticket at a reduced price if the regular ticket price is not feasible for you.
The presale will be run as a simple open presale (no vouchers!). We will release batches of tickets at three different times.
The presale dates will be announced on this page, so follow the RSS feed!

You can reach us at camp2023-tickets@cccv.de if you have questions.

Behind the scenes: Chaos Communication Congress presale

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 10:36:16 +0000

A scanner, watching you. Beep!

Have you ever tried to solve a problem that is completely, utterly, ridiculously impossible?

Welcome to our world! We’re the team running the Chaos Communication Congress ticket sales, and we want to follow the good example set by the content teams, and explain a bit of our work.

Now, from the outside, our problems may not seem all that impossible. In fact, you may think we have very little problems indeed: We run the presale of a conference that is notoriously sold out, and that’s generally what you want when you organise an event, right? Well, yes and no. Our primary goal is neither to sell every last ticket nor to increase our prices knowing that we’ll be sold out anyways – our goal is to invite participants in a way that is consistent with the values represented by our event and our community.

The Chaos Communication Congress is first and foremost a community event. Its unique beauty as well as its unique challenges originate in the fact that we are a huge distributed anarchical group of unpaid volunteers who manage to build an event for over 16000 people, every year. To make matters even harder, our completely self-organised decentralised structures work without a single point of authority. If you think that this cannot possibly work, you’re not alone: It’s hard to explain to people on the outside, and when we try, we’re usually met with a blank stare or disbelief.

None of our Congresses would work without two overlapping, vaguely-defined groups of people: The teams who spend inordinate amounts of time before and during the event organising and working, and the local groups and hackerspaces who do a lot of great work throughout the year that has nothing to do with Congress at all. Without the people tinkering in hackerspaces, running smaller events, creating awesome new hacks, educating people, visiting schools to talk to kids, running workshops, discussing positions and organising protests … we wouldn’t have the vibrant community that turns Congress into an event without its like.

Consequently one of our goals is to make sure that both organising teams and active people from other groups have a chance of attending Congress – but at the same time, we don’t want to limit ourselves completely to people who have already done their part. We’d be completely caught in our own filter bubble, and therefore we also want Congress to be accessible to new people.

This is a tough one. Fundamentally, there cannot be a perfect solution: We sell less tickets than people want to buy and our community grows larger every year. Period. Which means that some people will not be able to buy a ticket, no matter how much they want to, or how good a fit they’d be for the event.

Possible solutions to this are manifold: We could turn the event into a private event only for people who are already part of the community. We could just increase our ticket prices until the demand balances with the available tickets. We could go by “seniority” within the community, or by capability by introducing artificial technical barriers (a quiz? a hidden ticket sales server via ssh?). We could insist on a personal recommendation from a trusted person, or expand this into a dystopian voting system where only people with a sufficient number of votes get in. We could set certain quotas by demographics and then distribute tickets according to age, gender, social status, income, text editor, or hair color. We could make ticket sales entirely random (more on that later), or just sell as many tickets as we can, ignoring the problems that start when you let a community grow faster than it can support itself. But we don’t think any of these are a good idea.

Our current solution works like this: We don’t sell all tickets to the general public. Instead, we start by handing vouchers to all dedicated volunteers from last year’s Congress, so they can buy a ticket for this year if they want to. Simultaneously, we also give vouchers to local groups, like hackerspaces, and some activist groups. Their vouchers spawn new ones once they have been used, so that these groups can distribute the vouchers among themselves. Roughly half of our tickets are sold to somebody with a voucher. (The truth is slightly more complex, and if you like reading rule books, you can read up on them in our documentation).

Once the tickets reserved for the active community are used up, we turn to the remaining tickets, and sell those in three open presale days. They are notoriously gone within minutes, if not seconds. The technical challenges of serving several thousand requests per second in an attempt to sell tickets is interesting in its own right, but we’ll leave that ~~as an exercise for the reader~~ for another post.

Obviously, this is not an ideal system and it fails in a variety of interesting ways. For example, local groups may have questionable priorities when distributing their vouchers. People may have broken mailservers and will never receive their voucher. People who use a reproducing voucher may take a long time to pay, blocking people who wait for their replicated voucher. If you have very slow internet or slow reflexes or are not aware of the urgency, buying a ticket in the open presale is nearly impossible. It’s frankly heartbreaking to talk to people who will not be able to attend Congress.

And that’s a significant part of what we do: As the presale team, we answer all emails sent to our address, usually within a day. Last year, we received a total of 2690 emails and sent 1764 in 1623 threads, so roughly 10% of attendees contacted us. This excludes spam, but includes bounces – because we look at those, and try to figure out if there was a typo in the mail address, or if we know somebody who knows this person and can get in touch with them. If you write us, you don’t receive a canned response either – every response is more-or-less lovingly created by one of the four of us.

Other than that, what do we do? We usually deal with requests for vouchers from various groups, which has served to expand our knowledge of geography. Occasionally we help settle local conflicts when one group won’t talk to the other – it’s the Chaos *Communication* Congress, after all. To keep our workload at an unreasonable-but-possible level, we try to send vouchers to only one place per city, region, or thematic community. We also help people who found one of several tempting ways to make errors in their ordering process (typos in email addresses or payment references are the favourite). We help with payment difficulties and supply people with documentation for their visa application. We prepare the on-site ticket checkin – scanning this many tickets is a challenge of its own, of which we have written more here. We also administrate the servers, which is especially challenging when preparing for the open presale days, which can see request spikes of more than 16.000 requests per second, and requires a bit of careful planning. Before the presale starts, we negotiate conditions with the local public transport company, and help determine the ticket prices and what average ticket price we need to reach – you can always see the chart of average ticket prices here.

We’re also constantly looking for ways to improve the presale. Every year we make some minor changes and adjustments that go mostly unnoticed (which is good!). We have experimented with simulating parts of the presale, to get a feeling for the results that we would introduce with different replication rates, spawn times, and distribution mechanisms. This also involves talking to lots of people to help us balance the needs of different groups: Within Germany and from abroad, from within the community and newcomers, marginalised groups and people who have been around for most of CCC’s history, people who cannot participate in a regular presale for health reasons, and so on.

We’re nearly always happy to discuss your ideas, and we only have two requests if you want to let us know what you think: First off, please assume that we’re trying our best – because we are, and people who send us very angry mails about our malice or our incompetence just make us sad, but won’t improve the presale process.

Secondly: Please do not suggest that we try a lottery. We know, it’s tempting – it’s the first solution that springs to mind to solve this problem, but it’s also just not going to happen. The short explanation is: Any lottery that can’t be cheated easily will require us to check people’s IDs at the entrance, and that’s not something we are willing to do – both due to the logistical challenge of slowing down the entire check-in process extremely, and because we follow the principles of minimal data retention. We don’t care about your official names, we don’t want to check your ID, and we run screaming when thinking about the implications of this level of data aggregation.

A last note: While we have seen a lot of bitter, or angry, and occasionally hateful messages, we have also seen plenty of support, humour, and good-natured snark, which makes the whole effort more than worth it. Thank you!

34C3 Presale

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 18:36:51 +0000

It’s that time of the year again – we’re opening the presale for this year’s Chaos Communication Congress!

Again, there will be two phases, with the first one starting today.
During the first phase, we’d like to invite the core of our community to participate in the presale.
It will end as soon as no more tickets are left in the pool for this phase, but by 2017-10-15 at the latest.

During the second phase we’ll open the presale to everybody on a number of pre-announced time slots. We’ll announce these open presale dates at least two weeks ahead of time on this site.

We’ll offer all tickets for presale. Im case they don’t sell out, we’ll offer the rest on-site in Leipzig. We’ll tell you until 2017-12-20 whether this is going to be the case or not.

Planning an event of this scale at a new location comes with many uncertainties. As best as we could, we have calculated the average price necessary to make 34C3 pay for itself – you’ll find details and a chart plotting the average ticket price of currently sold tickets at tickets.events.ccc.de/.
If you are able to support us, please do!

You can find a more detailed explanation of the presale phases and the voucher system at tickets.events.ccc.de/34c3/docs/. If you have any questions, please refer to the FAQ at tickets.events.ccc.de/34c3/page/faq or contact us at 34c3-tickets@cccv.de.

See you in December!
The 34C3 presale team