Freesteel

Chaos Computer Roundup

Thursday, January 31st, 2008 Written by: Julian

Just before new year I was in Berlin for the Chaos Computer Congress. The video-casts of that event are finally coming on-line here, or, if you don’t like that, you can pick from this chaotic list of about a hundred conference recordings, where they don’t tell you which ones work.

I got featured in a podcast by bicyclemark — which I’m not going to listen to because it’s my own voice, which is even more excruciating to me than reading my own writing — that I’m told is not bad. I also showed my undemocracy.com site at a lightning talk, which is not on-line. Maybe I have to trawl through the hundred unofficial recordings to find it.

I did see some very good talks at the 24C3, which I can share with you from the list:

• Open Source Lobbying, tips from the trenches - From one angry e-mail to writing national policy on open source - The campaigners in the Netherlands won the case outstandingly. It’s very important to build up a dossier of irrefutable facts that are easy to digest by politicians. They want to share their materials, which are available here.
• The Arctic Cold War - bicyclemark It’s a 45 minute talk (don’t waste your time with the questions) about all the military hardware being moved into position by Canada, Denmark, Russia, etc, and the shenanigans over each country attempting to claim the polar sea according to the shape of the continental shelf, and this business about planting flags by submarine. To get the spirit, check out this long wikipedia article about a rock between Greenland and Canada.
• It was a bad idea anyway - The demise of electronic voting in The Netherlands The performance is just as bad as in America, but without the gratuitous complicity of the government using it for political power. It’s a catalogue of jokes. The speaker said: “You can laugh now, but your government (Germany) is bringing the same companies here.”
• What is terrorism? - And who is terrorising whom? - A talk by blogger whose husband has been picked up by the German terrorism police and is being subject to a state of unreasonable intelligence surveillance. This too was a complete joke, except for being real.

Those are the main ones that spring to mind. I might trawl through and list some other that were good, and watch the talks I didn’t mean to miss. Maybe I can go through the videos of the conference next year and not need to go. Howzat for using the internet to reduce travel, rather than as a tool to find yet more travel opportunities you would not otherwise know about.

What we need is to hold a post-ghost conference where you get a bunch of friends for two days and watch all the videos hourly on separate screens according to a strict timetable and discuss what you’re seen while having a beer in between sessions. You sometimes watch the same thing, or different things.

The groups who do the ghost conference before you can thin out the crap so when it’s your turn you get all the best bits only, and all the talks are outstanding. You could arrange to have the speakers on-line at some point during the day through their Skype connections and take questions.

I want to see people arranging conferences as a visual unit. Maybe the talks of the past three chaos conferences could make one kick-ass day long sessions all perfectly programmed on a timetable because you know what they are like now they are recorded on disk. Then we hold it, much like those Star Trek festivals where it’s every episode back-to-back over 40 hours. Same deal, but with conference material. If it’s worth travelling to, it’s worth doing this.