Speakers on CCC Event Blog

Meet the 36C3 track team “Resilience and Sustainability”

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 23:23:36 +0000

We’re 36C3’s Resilience and Sustainability content team and want to show you just our bit of work that helped making this year’s Fahrplan as amazing as it has turned out.

Our team consists of hackers and scientists, tinkerers and PhDs and was formed for 34C3 when we felt that the conference was developing a blind spot between complete destruction of all the IT things and the fascinations for the resulting apocalypse. We wanted to give a stage to new and shiny useful technology for a better and more resilient world – with actual prototypes!

This year’s motto “resource exhaustion” added a perspective on sustainability to the track – even though the term is rather overloaded. There’s a plethora of conferences selling you on the most recent hypes about how machine learning, crypto currencies and the cloud will save the world, but we think that it is in the spirit of this community to question everything, think and focus on technology that will last for much longer – both physically and from a software engineering point of view. We found it fitting to see how the existing resources can be used and reused, who’s building resilient technologies that can help people in emergencies, oppressive regimes or off-grid situations, and – in a broader scope – how can we build the systems of the future not riddled by the problems of our generation.

Along the way, we hope we can make software developers think about the impact of their busy-looping JS, bad communication patterns and faulty software architecture – all of which are significantly contributing to climate change.

The concept of resilience itself – especially combined with sustainability – is rather interdisciplinary, part hacking and making, part science and politics. This puts us in competition with other track teams trying to catch the most interesting lectures for a given subject, but also allowed us to trade slots with those teams as well, once we were running out of our allotted time budget. ;)

Next year, we hope to collect the “haveyoursay” feedback much earlier so we can incorporate your feedback and follow your suggestions for valuable speakers and topics.

While we were quite pleased with the submissions we found once CfP kicked off, our curation process started way earlier: Reflecting on feedback we received after 35C3, we came together in IRC and RL, brainstormed about interesting projects we heard about in the past year, thought about relevant topics and identified speakers worth having.

Even then, the speakers we “invited” still had to go through our rigorous curation process. After all, our team received a total of 74 lecture submissions and had to narrow them down into only 15 hours (in 18 lectures) of 36C3 programme. We vetted each submitter, trying to make sense of their submission, read their papers, ask and answer questions and spend the remaining time meeting and coordinating with all the other track teams, before finally writing this blog post! If we add up all the time spent preparing our 18 lecture foot steps in the Fahrplan, we’re looking at one or two weeks full time work for each of us.

In the end we’re quite proud of the topics we could cover this year. Of course, we’re still not short of topics to cover next year :-) It’s time for more critical reflection of wastefulness within the computer nerd scene and how we can minimise the environmental impact of our C3s and Camps in the years to come.

36C3 content teams running full steam

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 16:58:41 +0000

Last Sunday at midnight the submission period for our Call for Participation ended. The last submission, by a Swiss, landed just in time at 23:59:20 UTC. Our content curation teams will now use the next two weeks to review, rate, sort, and ultimately decide on a large number of submissions. We intend to inform all submitters on November 11th on whether we found a place for them in our Fahrplan.

At the time of our coordination meeting on Sunday there were 690 pending submissions in our system. To put this into perspective: If you would want to just spend a minute to review them all, you would be busy for eleven and a half hours. Another way to look at the numbers is that nearly five percent of 36C3 participants have applied to present a lecture!

Among these submissions the most popular tracks are “Ethics, Society & Politics” with 237, the “Security” track having 194 and the “Science” track seeing 82 submissions.

The following table contrasts the numbers of submissions this year with the numbers of lectures accepted for 35C3. This means that (assuming a similar amount of lectures this year), some teams have to reject 82 percent of their submissions, sometimes heartbreakingly so. The sheer range and creativity of the submissions left us deeply impressed with the energy and wisdom that is sparkling within our community. All without us offering a single cent of speaking fees.

Track	Submissions	Slots
Art & Culture	49	18
Ethics, Society & Politics	237	42
Hardware & Making	49	16
Resilience & Sustainability	61	16
Science	82	21
Security	194	39

To complicate things further: You gave us valuable feedback on our haveyoursay interface, which helped us identify important issues not yet covered by submissions. Of the over 2,000 comments you sent us, around a third was constructive and helpful, with some of them pointing to things other than the conference program where 36C3 could improve. So in addition of the submissions already in frab, some of this year’s content will be filled by invitations by our content curators.

What this all means: Each lecture that makes it into this year’s Fahrplan has prevailed against tough competition and each presenter we could not accept to the conference can be sure that they belong to a group of high quality submissions that had to be turned down solely due to time constraints. We simply do not have more than four days and five stages. With all high quality rejections alone we easily could fill two more conferences. And while our teams often try to explain their decisions together with their rejections, the overwhelming number of submissions makes answering each and everyone of them a time consuming effort. Also, as stated above, the most common reason not to accept a lecture is the simple lack of space in our Fahrplan. So if you receive a rejection email with that reason, please don’t take it as a cheap excuse.

But who are those in charge of selecting 36C3 content? At the moment, lectures are curated by six teams with three to ten main curators and an extended set of reviewers – all in all around sixty people now eagerly working through all those submissions. Some of them have introduced themselves in this blog in the past.

Some team members have introduced themselves on their social media accounts and actively work on encouraging potential speakers to submit (just monitor #36c3 to find out who they are), while others prefer to just help anonymously. And a lot of work is needed: Starting even during CfP submission periods, around 250 lectures needed to be fixed up, their durations, event type or tracks corrected, questions answered by email, co-speakers manually added, and typos corrected. With those bureaucratic nuisances out of the way, all submission now have the best chance to shine by their merits.

Over the next two weeks, our curators will now have to dive into the actual details: analyse the substance, verify claims made in the submissions, clustering them by rough topics, researching presenters regarding their expertise and ability to present – and to verify they do not accidentally invite PR drones, intelligence service, or military personnel on stage. So if you see storms of visitors on your social (business) media accounts, just smile and wave at our curation teams. ;)

Our teams are made up of experts in their respective fields, sometimes working in their domains for decades, who can tap into their vast networks to help estimate a submitter’s history. We want the speakers to present their own work, we want them to present for their enthusiasm for the topic, not money. We want them to be role models, not rock stars. So it is important that our teams find out who the speakers have been working for in the past, where they have presented and how that turned out, and if the conduct in their communities might raise objections to having them on our stages.

In the end we need to find a balance between novelty and community traditions, presentation skills and domain knowledge, entertainment value and soundness, allowing newcomers and tapping into weathered experts, presenting utopists and realists, as well as topics with global impact and niche expertise we think will be important soon.

With so many knobs to turn, we know it’s impossible not to be disappointed with the outcome of certain promising choices, and in the end each 36C3 participant brings a slightly different set of interests, so it might very well be that you find parts of the Fahrplan uninteresting and some lectures worth being replaced with others that you might find more interesting. But keep in mind, there are 16,000 other attendees who might disagree.

One last thing: While the content teams curating the main stages have the longest traditions, they’re by far not the only teams working on content presented at 36C3: As usual there will be self-organised lightning talks, which you can submit at https://c3lt.de/ once its 36C3 section is live. Also there are at least three decentralised stages at 36C3 assemblies that await your submission now: Chaos West will be running a stage at their asssembly, you can submit to here https://fahrplan.chaos-west.de/36c3/cfp, the Freifunk community has kicked off their CfP here https://talks.oio.social/36c3-oio/cfp and, last but not least, ChaosZone just opened theirs as well https://cfp.chaoszone.cz/36c3/cfp.

Oh, and one more thing: If the stars align just right, this year there might be a Hacker Jeopardy again!

Image by Florian Kleiner, CC BY-SA 2.0

MRMCD 2017: Bundesdatenschau – Call for Participation

Mon, 22 May 2017 10:34:19 +0000

The MetaRheinMainChaosDays (MRMCD) are proud to announce that they will host the first Bundesdatenschau (federate data show) on September 1st to 3rd – we’re looking forward to all kinds of data accompanied by their owners! We are looking for talks und workshops taking an in-depth look at the usage of public data and the protection of private data. We’re asking: How are public data resources (ab)used? Where and how has data been made public that shouldn’t have been? Who’s grabbing private data, and what are you doing against it? We’re interested in both social and technical answers. You can submit your talks or workshops at https://cfp.mrmcd.net/2017/ until July 23rd.

The MRMCD are an annual IT conference of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). It is organized by the MRMCD e. V. in cooperation with local hackerspaces, CCC groups, and nearby universities. The conference takes place on the first weekend of September, as per usual. This year’s conference location is the Piloty building of TU Darmstadt, where the MRMCD have taken place previously in 2010.

If you’re interested in submitting a talk, but you aren’t quite sure about the suitability or wording – please reach out to us at parkaufsicht [at] mrmcd.net. If you’re a first-time speaker, we’re happy to help you, too. If you have ideas for great talks or speakers, we’d be excited to hear those.

More information on the event can be found on 2017.mrmcd.net.

31C3 Lightning Talks

Wed, 17 Dec 2014 10:46:17 +0000

Did you think that the thrill of sharing your ideas in front of a huge audience at a C3 was something you’d never do? Do you work on a cool project and want to get the word out? Was your talk one of the hundreds that got rejected? Did you come up with an awesome hack that you need to share? Well, you’re in luck because there will be Lightning Talks at 31C3.

Taking place at 12:45 on Days 2, 3 and 4, these fast paced sessions are perfect for pitching new software or hardware projects, exploits, creative pranks or strange ideas you need to get out to a global audience. Even if you don’t have an awesome idea or project to share, a Lightning Talk is perfect for pitching your self organized session, assembly, or even a longer talk you’ll give at the speaker’s corner.

There will even be a special 180 second express round for those of you who don’t need fancy slides or a full five minutes to share your ideas.

Registration is now open for the Lightning Talk sessions at the 31C3. Act fast to reserve your slot. The last couple of times, lightning talk slots filled up on Day 1, so better hurry!

More Lightning talk information can be found at

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/wiki/Static:Lightning_Talks

The submission form is at:

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/wiki/Form:Lightning

Dear Speakers & Lightning-talkers

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:14:02 +0000

It’s time to glam up your lecture-descriptions!

Starting this year, every lecture’s long description will be printed in the Congress’ Proceedings. This was decided in the very last days.
So please try to enhance the abstract and description of your lecture in the particular Pentabarf-Record until:

Tomorrow, Sunday, 17:23:42 UTC

(9am PST; 12pm EST; 20pm MSK // 1am CNST; 3am AEST)

The long-description may even be one or two pages long, especially if you don’t submit a paper. Even your short-bio and, if given, a public photo will be printed.

If you are about to make a lightning-talk about your project, please fulfill the description and contact information on your talk in the wiki-page.

Speakers: Bre Pettis in the Thingiverse @ 25C3

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 23:05:31 +0000

“There is a special addictive feeling to manifesting the objects of your imagination. It’s a much more powerful feeling than acquiring consumer goods. It feels really good.” – Bre Pettis.

Bre Pettis wants you to make things.

You’ve seen his DIY videoblogging for Make: Magazine and Etsy. You shouldn’t miss a chance to see his History Hacker TV show. If you know how to make an LED blink, you’ve almost certainly seen the work coming out of his hackerspace in New York City, NYCResistor. If Bre hasn’t inspired you yet, he will soon!

At the 25C3, you can find out about his latest passion for bringing rapid prototyping straight out of science fiction and turning it into a nascent movement of hackers leading a rapid prototyping lifestyle.

“We live in a time where there are no limits to creativity. If you can imagine it, you can make it. The technology of rapidly prototyping is now at a stage where any object or project is in the realm of the possible…If one person gets hooked, I will be successful,” he said.

Bre will also be participating in a panel discussion on hackerspaces, sharing his experience building NYCResistor, the impact it’s had on his work and why you should start or join one.

“Our hacker collective’s focus is to learn, share, and make things. Having a group of friends to work on projects with is the thing I’m most proud of. If you daydream of having a space to hack on projects with friends, you really should start a hackerspace.”

Since he was 7 years old, fashioning bikes with his Uncle from scrap parts, Bre has been creating and inspiring others to create.

Before becoming an video phenom, he worked as an art teacher in the Seattle Public Schools while challenging himself in drawing, painting and other artistic pursuits. He was actively involved with Seattle’s Hackerbot Labs, creating everything from drawing robots to hovercrafts and the occasional near space payload or two.

“At the beginning of the week, I would set myself a task and have a tutorial video up by the end of the week.”

What started as a way of connecting with his students through video gradually turned into a career as a professional videoblogger and mainstream media personality. Since he spoke at the 24C3, he made a TV show about electricity for the History Channel, focusing on the innovations of noted historical hacker Nikola Tesla and his War of the Currents with Thomas Edison.

In November, he and a fellow NYCR member Zach Hoeken. launched Thingiverse, a web-based community to promote creating and free sharing of rapid prototype designs.

“My anticipation for amazing and beautiful objects is growing. What will the next person to discover rapid prototyping make? It’s very exciting knowing that the possibilities are endless.”

See Bre’s friend Adam and his rapidly prototyped chess set!

Bre on the Web, Twitter and on his Blog.