Last week I was at the 35th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig to talk on a panel about building inclusive hacker and maker communities. The Congress is organised annually by Europe’s largest hacker association, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), and is the continent’s oldest and largest hacker convention. This year it hosted 16,000 visitors who
This year was my second visit to Electromagnetic Field, the UK’s hacker camping festival, and by a weird twist of fate this year’s camp was held at the former site of a music festival I used to work at around 10 years ago. The new site was a lot bigger than its former location in
I spent the past couple of weekends getting my geek on at Electromagnetic Field, a camping festival for hackers and makers, and Nine Worlds, a fan culture convention that covers everything from Joss Whedon to roller derby. EMF camp has been running every two years since 2012 but I’d never made it along before: it’s