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33C3: Works for me

After 2 years of trying to participate in CCC, I finally made it, at the 33rd edition! This year everything started when my friend from FSFE, Erik, invited me to have a talk about Wikidata at the FSFE assembly happening there. So this was my chance to finally make it to CCC. And with my friend Jan,  we applied for another talk on gender diversity in free software.

Finished my slides, both talks accepted

Financial support request at Wikimedia Foundation: accepted

Got the ticket

..and BOOM, 33C3 here i come!

I thought I had been to many conferences and saw everything that a conference can offer. But this this was another level. Probably the best organized mass event in the universe. So many great talks, so many parallel tracks, so little time. CCC this year opened the door to around 10.000 hackers, people interested in privacy and computer security, activists, makers etc. The motto of this congress was “works for me”  which is meant as a critical nudge towards developers who stop after technology works for them, while it should work for everyone.
This congress is a huge gathering of people to share information, talk and party. The event also has a large un-conference part, hacking spaces, and lounge areas, which was the place where I spent most of the time. Electronics everywhere, decorated nicely, and after the second day, the outside world simply starts to fade and congress becomes the new reality.
My talks were on the 2nd and 3rd day, so I had a stress-free day in the beginning to enjoy the congress. Directly the first people I met were my friends from BalCCon and my Wiki friends from Germany.
Then on the second day I gave my talk on Wikidata (slides). Daniel and me decided to merge our talks and to host a 2-hour talk/workshop about Wikidata. What surprised us both was the number of people attending our talk and both of us immediately regretted not asking for a bigger room. The talk went quite well! We could have worked a bit more on who would say which parts, in order to cover as much as information that we could in those 2hours. But the participants asked some good questions so I think the result was good.

Some tweetts about this talk:

And after the talk I had a Wikidata game challenge with Silvan and I have to teach Tomas  from FSFE how to learn Greek using Wiktionary and Wikidata.

My second talk (co-hosted with Jan-Christoph Borchardt), was as crowded as the first one but the room was bigger so no need to sit on the ground. 🙂
We presented on Gender Diversity in Free Software (slides). And giving the talk, it was clear to me that there should be more people talking about gender diversity in free/open software. At 33C3 I only found one other talk dedicated to gender diversity (although I hope I missed one in the agenda):»Making Technology Inclusive Through Papercraft and Sound« – and there were so many people talking about everything else but this issue. We’re missing a real problem here. Can we make computer education more gender-inclusive?

 

There are many things I like to improve when giving a talk, and the first one to do is hosting more talks and workshops.
Huge thank you go to Wikimedia Foundation for the financial support, FSFE for accepting my talks and to all the weirdly wonderful people who made the as great as it was.

Links:

Feature image credits: User Hinnerk R. CC.SA.4.0