If you don’t already follow us on Mastodon, please follow EMF’s main account and our info account. Information gets announced there more frequently than our emails.

Note: If you aren’t receiving emails, please check which email you registered your ticket with - that will be the email we are contacting you on. If you’re still not getting emails, let us know at contact@emfcamp.org.

In this update, we’ll be talking about:

• Call for Participation
  • Family Workshops
  • Lightning Talks
  • Speed Runners
• Badge Updates
  • Tildagon 2026: Spaceagon
  • Hexpansion Day Market
• Villages
  • Equipment Hire
• Code of Conduct
• Ticket Refunds
• Club Mate Pre-Orders
• Sponsors
  • Supporting EMF as an Individual
• Any other questions?

Call for Participation

We are still looking for talks, workshops, and installations!

Submissions for talks and workshops will close on the 7th of June. If you have a talk or workshop you’d like to bring to EMF, let us know at https://www.emfcamp.org/cfp before then.

We’re also still accepting applications beyond this date for Installations and Family Workshops until we run out of space.

Family Workshops

We have opened the Family Workshop Call for Participation. Drop-in sessions geared towards families. This will stay open past the 7th of June.

If you’d like to submit something, you can do so here: https://www.emfcamp.org/cfp

Just like talks and ordinary workshops, getting your family workshop proposal accepted will guarantee you tickets to EMF.

Lightning Talks

We’ll be running several lightning talk sessions for those who want to give a short 10 minute talk about anything at all. Registration will open shortly before the event for ticket-holders only and is first-come-first-served.

Speed Runners

The Arcade Stage will be hosting a friendly speed running event on Sunday evening, if you like to play games very quickly and would like to show off, fill in this form.

We’re also running a synesthesia night on Saturday. If you’re freakishly good at Tetris Effect, Rez, or Sektori and want to DJ a dance floor with a game controller let us know via the form above.

Badge

Preorders for Tildagon 2026: Spaceagon

We’ve announced an upgrade for the EMF Tildagon electronic camp badge: “Spaceagon”.

This year it features touch areas on the front, a tiny joystick, and the screen no longer falls off. We also made a tiny plug-in keyboard hexpansion!

You can now order complete badges, upgrade kits for your 2024 Tildagon, the keyboard hexpansion, and spare parts in case you need them.

There are a limited number of keyboard hexpansions available, so order soon.

All of these can be purchased at https://www.emfcamp.org/tickets/badge.

Hexpansion Day Market

We’ll also be hosting a day market for buying, trading, and selling badge Hexpansions in NullSector on Saturday from 2 to 4pm, and again on Sunday from 10am to 12pm.

Bring your own Hexpansion to trade or sell, or just your pocket money to seek out awesome plug-ins. Please bring whatever you need to help you hold and display your stock so you can comfortably perform any transactions (e.g. a wearable display so you have your hands free). This is an exclusive market for Hexpansions only - other markets are available.

Villages

If you’re planning to have a village at EMF, please make sure to register it as soon as possible in order to give people time to discover it.

If you’d like to join or contact an existing village, you can find the list of villages (and their contact details) here.

Equipment Hire Now Open

You can now hire equipment for your village: folding chairs, and trestle tables.

Unfortunately, this year we’re struggling to hire village marquees - if you need one for your village, you may have to make your own arrangements. But please do not engage a third-party marquee company without talking to us!

If you have any other questions about villages, please email villages@emfcamp.org.

Code of Conduct

EMF has a code of conduct. Please make sure to familiarize yourself with it to make sure EMF is a fun and inclusive event for everyone.

If you need any help with conduct or need to raise conduct issues, please let us know at conduct@emfcamp.org.

Ticket Refunds

EMF is incredibly popular this year - ticket allocations are extremely sold-out, and while we’re happy to have such high demand, we also want to give as many people the chance to come as possible.

If you have bought tickets that you won’t use, we are offering full refunds so that your ticket can be released to someone else - just go to your ticket purchases page to request a refund.

If you know someone else who has bought a ticket they won’t be able to use, make sure to let them know. We’ll be closing refunds on June 15th, so if you need a refund on your tickets, be sure to do so soon.

Club Mate Pre-Orders

We’re offering the ability to pre-order 20x500ml cases of Club Mate to pick up from the bar during the event - we’ll have Club Mate, Club Mate Granat, and Club Mate Zero. In good news, it’s cheaper than previous years!

Get your orders in at https://www.emfcamp.org/tickets/club-mate.

Sponsors

We’d like to thank our Palladium, Platinum, Gold, and Silver sponsors.

Palladium

• Nationwide

Platinum

We don’t have any platinum sponsors yet - this could be you!

Gold

• Foundry Zero
• FullFibre / Zzoomm
• MathWorks

Silver

• Antithesis (Silver)
• cside (Silver)
• Grafana (Silver)
• Mythic Beasts (Silver)
• Onega (Silver)
• UTAW (Silver)

Badge

In addition to our sponsors above, we’d like to thank Bosch Sensortec for sponsoring the EMF badge specifically.

Supporting EMF as an Individual

In addition to sponsorship, you can support EMF as an individual at the self-service sponsors page. Anything you give us will be used to fund projects that make the festival more fun for everyone.

Any other questions?

For any other questions, our contact page explains where and who to send your questions to.

See you soon!

Keeping our promise, the 2026 Tildagon has a new front board to match the “space” theme, along with the first official hexpansion to add new capabilities. All of these upgrades are available to order now.

We call it the Spaceagon.

This is a prototype with prototype artwork - the final design will be revealed in the field.

What’s new?

Only a bit! True to our word, you can re-use the main board from your 2024 Tildagon, the battery, the screen, and any exciting hexpansions you’ve collected.

The new top addresses common issues with the previous version - LEDs were more fragile than expected, buttons were awkward and easy to break, and worst of all the screen could fall off and hide in long grass. All of these problems are solved by protecting them inside a sandwich of two boards.

We also took the opportunity to add a tiny joystick and a compass, as well as a ring of touch-sensitive areas around the screen - one over each LED. The touch detection chip manufacturer claims it is resistant to “water, ketchup, oil and blood“, but we do not advise testing this.

And of course, we love to make the badge look beautiful - we’ll be saving the final artwork as a surprise.

Keebdeck Keyboard

We are also releasing our first official hexpansion - a keyboard, so you can tap out messages and be less frustrated when entering wifi passwords. Full thanks to sodoku and davedarko who designed it for us.

How do I get it?

Please upgrade your existing badge rather than buying a new one - we have instructions on how to safely strip your existing badge for parts.

We are charging a small amount for the badge upgrade kit to cover manufacturing costs, and the keyboard hexpansion is an optional add on.

Upgrade kits, keyboards, complete badges, and spare parts are available for EMF ticketholders to order now.

You do not need to upgrade your Tildagon if you love it just as it is - we still support it!

Don’t Panic

We are not breaking any existing apps or hexpansions - the hexpansion interface remains unchanged, and the buttons and LEDs are in the same position as before.

There will be a major firmware release before the event, and while we are doing our best to maintain backward compatibility please do test your apps to check they still function as expected.

I want to hack it!

If you would like to design a case to fit the new badge, or some other improbable attachment, you can find more photos and STEP files of the design here, and you can find full information on designing your own hexpansions and apps on the badge developer documentation.

Our Sponsors

We’d like to say a special thanks to our first Palladium-tier sponsor, Nationwide.

We’d also like to thank our three Gold-tier sponsors:

• Foundry Zero,
• FullFibre / Zzoomm, and
• MathWorks

and our Silver-tier sponsors:

• Antithesis,
• cside,
• Grafana,
• Mythic Beasts,
• Onega, and
• UTAW

In addition to our many sponsors above, the EMF badge is sponsored by Bosch Sensortec, which helps us make the EMF badge as affordable as possible for EMF attendees.

In this blog post (which we’re also sending as emails to the address you bought your tickets with), we’ll be updating you on things to do at EMF, and helping you with what to bring in order to have a great time. Closer to the date, we’ll also send summaries of conditions on the field, so that you know whether to pack warm or pack light and whether to break out the wellies. In each email, we’ll also be updating you on anything new that’s been posted to our blog.

Note: If you aren’t receiving emails, please check which email you registered your ticket with - that will be the email we’re contacting you on. If you’re still not getting emails, let us know at contact@emfcamp.org.

EMF’s Theme

Every EMF has a theme - this year, EMF goes to space!

Not just outer space, though – we want to celebrate discovery, engineering, exploration, and fascination with our home planet, too. From distant galaxies to our pale blue dot, neutron stars to the smallest microbacteria, we want you to get excited about what fascinates you out there.

If you know your way around a sewing machine or potting shed, or want to help the Design team in other ways, sign up here!

Ticket Refunds

We’ve seen extremely high demand for tickets this year, and while we’re happy to have such high demand, we also want to give as many people as possible the chance to come. If you’ve bought tickets that you won’t be able to use, we are offering full refunds. You can request a refund through our website.

Parking Tickets

If you’re planning to drive to EMF, make sure to purchase a vehicle ticket - we’re trying to keep cars to a minimum, so please take public transport or car-share if you can.

If you’re planning on bringing a campervan or other live-in vehicle, be aware that live-in vehicle tickets may not be available for much longer, so get them here while they’re hot.

Participating in EMF

Of course, EMF wouldn’t be what it is without you, giving great talks, making performances, putting up installations, and most importantly bringing yourselves!

Call for Participation

If you have a talk, installation, workshop, or performance you’d like to bring to EMF, our Call for Participation is now open!

We’ll close submissions to the CfP around a month before the event, but we’re already reviewing them. The sooner you submit, the better your chance of being accepted!

Need an Idea?

If you know you’d like to make something for EMF, but you’re stuck for inspiration on what to make, we’ve got a list of suggestions - at wildly varying levels of practicality and seriousness - available as a pastebin here. It’s not meant to be a requirements list: take it as literally or as laterally as you would like. Surprise us, and have fun!

Arcade

The EMF arcade is returning for 2026 and we’re welcoming submissions for games or playable objects. If you have a game that might work in our arcade, submit it here!

Volunteering

EMF is made possible by many volunteers, both before, during, and after the event. Learn more about volunteering at EMF.

Joining the EMF Community

You can chat with the EMF community on Matrix or IRC:

• On Matrix, join #general:emfcamp.org.
• On IRC, join #emfcamp on the Libera.Chat network.

Villages

Villages are places for bringing together groups of people - you can register a village for your group of friends, for people with a shared interest, or anything else that brings you together with others. Some villages are also open to the public and run events, like the Maths Village, while others might be more private.

We’ll shortly be offering the opportunity to hire tents, chairs and tables for your village through the website.

Find out more about villages at EMF’s villages page, and browse the current list of villages here. Some of them may put their contact details there so that you can get in touch with them.

Register your Village

Anyone with an EMF ticket can register a village. Make sure to put a bit about yourself so that others can know what you’re about, including contact details if you want people to get in touch with you! During EMF, you’ll be able to update your page to tell people where you are.

If you have any other questions at all about the villages, please email villages@emfcamp.org, who’ll be happy to help you.

Areas

Many cool areas that you know from previous years and that are brand new are happening at this year’s EMF! Here are a few that we’re happy to announce, but there will no doubt be more coming out in our next emails.

The Greenhouse

We’ve already announced the Greenhouse on our blog, but here’s a little summary for those who missed it:

• Building on the success of 2024, the plant exchange is back - with a new name!
• You are invited to once again bring small cuttings, offshoots, seedlings, bulbs or spare seeds for everyone to browse at the Greenhouse - anyone can take home what they like.
• The Greenhouse will also provide an exhibition area where you can display small plant creations with a suitable space vibe.

Zine Library

Bring zines!

We’re going to have a zine library in one of the lounges. We’d love it if this could be filled with all kinds of zines made and enjoyed by EMF people. If you have one or more zines you’d like to donate, please bring them along and drop them off at the library during the festival. We’d also love to see a zine workshop in the CfP of you feel like you’d be up for it.

NullSector

The NullSector returns for another year of fun, music and dancing! The year is 2095, nine years since the first stirrings of rebellion. The rebels have taken over another Polybius Biotech facility, one they are opening up for a weekend of celebration.

Volunteering for NullSector

NullSector are looking for volunteers to assist with:

• Graphic Design
• Voice Recording
• Setup and Teardown
• Prebuild Help

If any of the above sound like something you’d like to help with, contact volunteer@emfcamp.org. Like in our volunteering section above, you need to already have a ticket to EMF to volunteer to help with NullSector.

DJs

If you would like to DJ in NullSector please make a submission via the Call for Participation.

Night Market

The NullSector Night Market is also coming back for another year! It will run from 6pm to 11pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. If you’re an independent seller looking to sell some of your goods at EMF, apply here by 18th May (but sooner is better!).

There will also be a day market for buying, trading, and selling hexpansions. If you would like to have a stall where you will be selling Hexpansions along with other products, then still feel free to apply above, but if you’re planning on only selling hexpansions, please hang back from applying above and stay tuned for more details about the day market in a future email.

The Badge

In 2024, the EMF badge was the Tildagon, a modular badge for which people contributed their own expansions! This year, we’re going to be releasing a new front board for the Tildagon - this will be available as an upgrade for 2024 badges, or as a complete badge.

As with last year, these will be available soon to pre-order on the EMF website. We’re trying to keep the price similar to last time, which was £13. We’ll also be selling spares like screens and batteries.

Our Sponsors

We’d like to say a special thanks to our first Palladium-tier sponsor, Nationwide.

We’d also like to thank our three Gold-tier sponsors:

• Foundry Zero,
• FullFibre / Zzoomm, and
• MathWorks

and our Silver-tier sponsors:

• Antithesis,
• cside,
• Grafana,
• Mythic Beasts,
• Onega, and
• UTAW

In addition to our many sponsors above, the EMF badge is sponsored by Bosch Sensortec, which helps us make the EMF badge as affordable as possible for EMF attendees.

Supporting EMF

Do you like seeing weird and wonderful things at EMF? Got a few spare quid?

In addition to sponsorship, there are many ways to support EMF as an individual at the self-service sponsors page. Anything you give us will be used to fund projects that make the festival more fun for everyone.

Any other questions?

If you have any other questions, check out our contact page to know where to send your questions to.

We look forward to having you here!

Our first email to attendees about EMF will be going out soon, but in the meantime, we’d like to announce the Greenhouse early, to give folks a chance to get their plants ready!

What is The Greenhouse?

Building on the success of 2024, the plant exchange is back - with a new name!

Plant Sharing

You are invited to once again bring small cuttings, offshoots, seedlings, bulbs or spare seeds for everyone to browse and select from to take home. There will be trays for keeping your plant contributions in during EMF.

Important: We’re really very sorry about this but, due to import/export regulations, DO NOT transport any plants or seeds into nor out of the UK - we hope our international visitors can take home some green-fingered inspiration and enthusiasm instead!

Exhibition Area

There will also be an exhibition area, where you can display small plant creations such as terrariums, and rockscapes (but no glass containers please!) with a suitable space vibe.

Note: If you are thinking of bringing a plant related installation which is microwave size or larger please submit it via the Installations Call for Participation page so we can find the best location for it.

Where is The Greenhouse?

The intergalactic growing pod will be located adjacent to the Lounge.

The practical details

For The Greenhouse to work, we both need you to bring plants & take them home with you.

Bring Containers

If you can bring your shares and swaps in small non-glass containers or pots, that would be ideal - but, if transport space is tight, pack your swaps in plastic bags as we will have some containers available.

Label Your Plants

Please label what you have brought (surprises are lovely, but it’s safest if everyone knows what is what).

Care for Your Plants During the Event

Don’t forget to check in regularly during the event to keep an eye on the hydration of any growing offerings you’ve brought.

Take Your Plants Home

Be prepared to take away your new plants (and any of your donations that haven’t been adopted) at the end of the event - so remember to save or bring clean(ish) plastic bags or pots.

You could also post your chosen cuttings into an empty water bottle to take home in your bags or rucksacks (you can cut open the bottle to extract them later).

Donations for the Greenhouse

If you’d like to make a donation to EMF funds in return for adopting a new plant, seedling, cutting or some seeds, that can be made at the shop during EMF - but this is not required.

Thank You!

We are so looking forward to welcoming everyone back to our little calm green piece of Space!

Our Sponsors

We’d like to thank our three Gold-tier sponsors:

• Foundry Zero,
• FullFibre / Zzoomm, and
• MathWorks

and our Silver-tier sponsors:

• Antithesis,
• cside,
• Grafana,
• Mythic Beasts,
• Onega, and
• UTAW

If you have a talk, installation, workshop, or performance you’d like to bring to EMF, now’s your chance to let us know:

https://www.emfcamp.org/cfp

We’re especially keen to hear from people with different backgrounds than you’d expect to find at a technology conference. Talks and workshop submissions are reviewed anonymously by our diverse review panel.

Successful proposals will receive the opportunity to purchase a weekend ticket, or a free day ticket.

We’ll close submissions to the CfP around a month before the event, but we start reviewing them sooner. The sooner you submit, the better your chance of being accepted!

Arcade

The EMF arcade is returning for 2026 and we’re welcoming submissions for games or playable objects.

If you have a game that might work in our arcade, you can now submit it here. If your game is accepted, you’ll also have the opportunity to buy a ticket.

Tickets

The next round of ticket sales will be on Thursday 2nd April at 18:00 BST, on our ticket sales page. Our tickets do sell quickly, so make sure you’re ready at the right time.

This will be our last major round of ticket sales, but we’ll be reselling returned tickets up to the start of the event. Keep an eye on our Fediverse feed for notifications.

If you have a ticket to EMF and can’t come, we’re now offering full refunds, which you can request through your website account. We expect to offer refunds until around one month before the event.

If you’ve bought a ticket for a friend, you can also transfer it to them through your account.

Sponsors

While your ticket covers the basic infrastructure for EMF, our lovely sponsors help to make the event pretty and accessible. We’re still looking for sponsors for this year’s event – if you know a company which might be interested, please send them the link!

We’ve also now opened up sponsorship tiers at £1,000 and below, which can be purchased through our website.

We’d like to say special thanks to FoundryZero for being the first gold sponsor of EMF 2026, as well as cside, Grafana, Mythic Beasts, and Onega.

Love,

The EMF team

• Monday 9th March, 20:00 UTC
• Sunday 22nd March, 15:00 UTC
• Thursday 2nd April, 18:00 BST

Prices start at £190 for an adult ticket. Tickets will be sold at www.emfcamp.org/tickets, and you can see the full list of prices there.

While we have increased the capacity of EMF slightly this year, we expect tickets to sell out quickly, as they have in previous years.

Volunteer tickets

If you volunteered or spoke at the last EMF in 2024, you are guaranteed a chance to buy a ticket. You will receive a voucher by email before the 22nd of March. Please drop us an email at tickets@emfcamp.org after that date if you haven’t received your voucher.

Call for Participation

If you want to submit a talk or workshop proposal to EMF 2026, our Call for Participation will open soon, and we’ll send another email when this happens. If your proposal is accepted, you’ll be guaranteed a chance to buy a ticket.

See you in the field!

Love,
The EMF Team

Electromagnetic Field 2026 will be held on Friday 17th to Sunday 19th July 2026, and we’ll be back at Eastnor Castle Deer Park in Herefordshire. As always, you’re welcome to arrive from Thursday morning to get your villages set up and stay until midday on Monday 20th July to get the most out of the event.

We’ll be sending another email once we’ve set the ticket sale dates.

Theme

In 2026, EMF goes to space!

Not just outer space, though - we want to celebrate discovery, engineering, exploration, and fascination with our home planet, too. From distant galaxies to our pale blue dot, neutron stars to the smallest microbacteria, we want you to share and get excited about what fascinates you out there.

All contributions to the event are loved and welcomed, but if you want to be inspired by the event theme our full announcement can be found here.

Suggestions welcome!

Our team is on the lookout for new and varied speakers, teachers, performers, builders, and enthusiasts: If you’ve seen anyone recently, or know of an interesting person who might fit with the EMF vibe, let us know and we’ll reach out to them.

We’ll be opening our public Call for Participation in the new year, but before then we’d love your help to bring new ideas and communities to EMF and make it even more interesting!

Until then

To tide you over until next year, all the video recordings from EMF 2024 are now available on media.ccc.de and Youtube, along with talks from every EMF since 2012.

See you again soon!

Love,
The EMF Team

Not just outer space, though – we want to celebrate discovery, engineering, exploration, and fascination with our home planet, too. From distant galaxies to our pale blue dot, neutron stars to the smallest microbacteria, we want you to get excited about what fascinates you out there.

In the coming months we’ll be publishing further inspiration, graphics, concepts, and posters for you to share and reuse in your own projects.

We’re looking for volunteers to help us ahead of the event to design and assemble site decoration, and contribute plants to our orbital greenhouse. If you know your way around a sewing machine or potting shed, or want to help the Design team in other ways, sign up here!

We love to see your contributions about whatever gets you nerdy and excited – we hope you’ll be inspired to join in.

It’s a very big universe out there. Gazing up at the night sky it can be hard to tell a satellite from a star from a galaxy, but further study is rewarded with a deeper understanding.

Find something that fascinates you, from the whorls on your fingertips to the spiral arms of a galaxy. Take that second look, and a third, and a fourth. Show us what you see, and help others explore.

We may be standing on a pale blue dot, but there’s definitely a lot going on down here.

This was the best EMF so far. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

It would not have been possible without all the wonderful volunteers, speakers, installation-builders, performers, sponsors - and all of you!

Many thanks from the EMF team for making the festival feel like such a special place to be.

There’s a few things to wrap up before we hibernate for a year:

• 😷 Let us know if you became ill at EMF (or just after)
• 🔍 You have until December to claim Lost Property
• 📷 Send us your memories & photos
• 📝 Please give us feedback!
• 📹 Talk videos will be published in the coming months
• 📈 Help us collect diversity statistics
• 📟 Update your Tildagon badge
• 🧣 Last orders for EMF fabric!
• 🦺 Get involved and help make EMF happen
• ⏭️ Sign up to our mailing list for news about EMF 2026

Infection Survey

If you became ill at EMF or shortly after (with COVID or anything else) please let us know by filling in our infection survey.

This allows us to keep track of any illnesses contracted during the festival and informs our health policy at future events.

Lost property

If you think you lost something at EMF please contact us now - we had 114 items handed in, so there’s a good chance we have your beloved thing.

Any unclaimed items will be donated to charity at the end of the year.

Memories & photos

It’s impossible to see everything at EMF, so please share your photographs and videos with us, as well as blog posts, articles, and anything else that documents your time in the field.

If you post anything on social media please tag it with #emf2024 and @ us on mastodon or twitter so we don’t miss it!

Feedback

We love your feedback, both good and bad! Let us know what you loved and what you’d like to see improved in the future.

You don’t have to have a potential solution but please keep feedback constructive. We can’t guarantee it’ll be fixed, but we will listen and take your feedback into account where possible.

Diversity

We really care about making EMF an inclusive and welcoming event, and we want to continue to expand our community. To this end, just before the festival we published our first diversity blog which includes statistics on speaker diversity at EMF 2024 and our plans for the future.

We’ll be publishing these statistics for every future event to track our progress, and we will be publishing statistics for our previous events if the data is available.

Please make sure you’ve completed our 2024 diversity form - give it a quick look even if you’ve already filled it in as we’ve added some new questions.

Talk videos

We will be publishing recordings of every recorded talk over the next few weeks on media.ccc.de and our youtube channel.

Please be patient - it takes a lot of work to edit so many great talks! If you spoke and allowed us to record it, we will let you know when your talk has been published.

Tildagon & Hexpansions

We’ve seen a lot of people having fun with their Tildagon badges and are absolutely delighted by the number of people creating Hexpansions to plug into it - we are aware of over 60!

The badge team have been busy working on the documentation and have substantially improved the software with features & fixes being added every week, so please make sure you update the firmware on your badge. We’ll be working on it continuously over the next two years.

If you’re inspired to make your own Hexpansion, PCBWay have kindly provided us with $50 vouchers for their prototyping service. To claim one, send us a short description of your Hexpansion idea.

Fabric

If you loved the EMF 2024 theme, why not make a pair of pyjamas or a fashionable jacket covered in it? The designer is organising a bulk order of fabrics printed with the tiling “network” design you saw all over the festival.

Orders for fabric must be placed by the end of Tuesday 25th June 2024 in Morag’s shop.

Reuse your SIM card

If you bought a SIM card from the shop to use with our on-site phone network please don’t throw it away - you can use it again at other events, or reprogram it at home!

Email the ICCID (the number on the front) to poc@emfcamp.org and we will send you the key to reprogram your SIM.

EMF 2026

EMF will return in 2026. You must be subscribed to our mailing list to be notified when it is announced.

If you spoke, volunteered, installed, or in some way contributed to EMF 2024 you are guaranteed tickets for EMF 2026 when they go on sale. If you’re worried that we might not have a record of you volunteering please let us know.

EMF is run entirely by volunteers and we need your help to make it happen. We’ll be having a rest for the next few months and serious planning for 2026 will start next year.

However this year went so well that the team are excited, energised, and scheming is already occurring - if you’d like to get involved and make EMF even better please get in touch or sign up to our volunteer mailing list. We’d love to have you on the team.

Keep in touch

If you’d like to stay up to date over the next two years:

• Sign up to our mailing list - otherwise we won’t notify you about EMF 2026!
• Follow us on mastodon @emf@social.emfcamp.org (or check out our other accounts)
• Chat with our community on Matrix at #general:emfcamp.org or IRC #emfcamp on libera.chat.

Sponsors

EMF would have been impossible without the support of our amazing sponsors this year.

Once again we are incredibly grateful to:

• Pimoroni
• Codethink
• Espressif
• AND Digital
• Texas Instruments
• Onega
• Mythic Beasts
• MSD Animal Health Technology Lab
• Nationwide
• PCBWay
• United Tech and Allied Workers
• Bosch
• Octopus
• Mathworks
• Canonical

If you’d like to support us in the future, please get in touch.

See you in 2026.

Love, The (exhausted) EMF Team

P.S. If you can’t wait two years our Dutch friends are organising the next camp, WHY 2025. We’ll be attending.

There are two parts to this blog: firstly a general discussion of diversity at EMF, the second part covers this year’s statistics and forms part of our ongoing commitment to track our work.

Summary

We recognise that EMF has a problem in attracting marginalised people to both attend and present at the festival. We want to fix this. Our first step towards this is improving our transparency around diversity: what we’ve attempted and how successful it’s been. From now on we’re committing to publish our statistics around diversity, we will also publish the statistics for all previous years for which we have data. This year has been mixed with regards to diversity, we had a great success in our Arcade where, of the 30 games donated, 16 were led by or created by people of traditionally marginalised backgrounds in the games industry. We’ve also scheduled quiet hours (9am-10am) every day so everyone can enjoy them. A less successful initiative was work with the Leicester Space Centre and Leicester Libraries to bring disadvantaged families over for a day trip; unfortunately this was derailed by factors beyond our control. Amongst other commitments for 2026 we will also be allocating at least £3,000 from our core budget to cover fees for speakers from diverse backgrounds.

If any of this is something you’d like to help us with next time (2026) or, if you know someone who might want to help us, please email inclusion@emfcamp.org

On Recognising a Problem

We recognise that our efforts are lacking when it comes to attracting and offering a space to some groups and communities who are traditionally left out of Tech/Art/Science events. In creating such a large and complex event entirely through volunteer efforts, we recognise that in some areas we haven’t paid enough attention to inclusion, and we may have mirrored some of the disadvantages present in society.

We have made various attempts to change this and we expect that we need to make changes to how we work generally as well as in specifically in our content selection process and outreach attempts. What we are less aware of is what all of those changes should look like. We will look to work with other communities and organisations to seek that knowledge and help.

EMF2024

This event, we will be running a feedback panel on Sunday in the drop-in (workshop 0) tent at 14:30.

We want your honest feedback on any issues - submitting to the CFP, the site, our communications and more. We’re here to listen, take notes and understand. We will not have answers to all your questions but we’ll do our best to make sure you’re heard and that we learn from what you have to say.

Planning for 2026

In 2026, we will continue our transparency on speakers and submissions. We have launched a new diversity page on the website where our statistics will be shown and archived for future events, and it should provide data our future efforts can be measured against. We will improve our voluntary demographic survey next time to help educate our choices, enhance EMF for people with disabilities and learn more about LGBTQ+ needs.

We are keen to improve EMF for all by implementing lessons from your feedback early in the planning cycle. We want to make the event feel welcoming and inclusive to more people from the point where our dates are officially announced.

EMF is a fully volunteer-organised event, and our policy has previously been not to pay speakers more than travel expenses. We fully understand that in order to improve diversity, especially of minority ethnic backgrounds, we need to pay fees; to solve this we’ll be committing at least £3,000 to funding this at EMF 2026.

Our commitments for 2026 include:

• Collecting statistics for each event to compare against our previous events, and making these public
• Starting the outreach processes a lot earlier than 6 months before the event
• Allocating at least £3,000 from our core budget to cover fees for speakers from diverse backgrounds
• Offering vouchers so invited speakers to bring their networks and introduce EMF to more people
• Taking on feedback and actioning as much as we can to improve our reach and experience

Get involved

We need your help in opening our event to more people. Our team will take the lead and ultimately are responsible for improving EMF, but we want a diverse group of community champions to support us in this process. We are seeking people who can advise us on how to lower barriers for any group who currently feel they are either not represented at EMF or cannot attend for any reason.

If you are at all invested in improving representation of any community at EMF, we would love you to help us with feedback either in one of the sessions, via email to inclusion@emfcamp.org or by joining the team. All feedback is welcome, even if it’s just a little thought in your head - maybe it’ll be the catalyst for a big change.

What we did this year

That’s not to say we haven’t done anything this year. In addition to our usual outreach, we tried a few new things:

Arcade

This year we built our own arcade. We only had a short time to do so, but we leveraged our networks and some of the installations that had been submitted to rapidly put one together.

One of the things we are particularly proud of is that of the 30 games that were donated for the arcade, 16 of them have been led by or created by people of traditionally marginalised backgrounds in the games industry.

Invited Speakers

Inviting speakers was an obvious space where we could improve our representation of people who wouldn’t normally come to EMF. As an enthusiastic team, we discovered a few things in the process.

Finding potential speakers takes a lot of time and effort even with personal contacts being offered up from the EMF community. Emailing (even from personal, professional addresses to personal contacts) gave a very low hit rate and offering a free weekend ticket and reimbursement for travel was not sufficient. While free tickets to EMF sound great for our usual audience, it’s quite hard to explain to people who have never been involved in such a community-run event and are overwhelmed with speaking requests.

Unfortunately we had far less success than hoped, largely because we did not start this process early enough for 2024. We are determined to do better for next time. We had many generally positive responses about the idea of speaking at EMF, and will follow up for 2026!

Other Outreach

Another initiative we attempted for this year was to work with our contacts at the Leicester Space Centre and Leicester Libraries to bring a group of disadvantaged families over for a day trip. Ultimately this was cancelled at the last minute due to lack of staffing available at LSC/LL due to a local festival on the same weekend. We will attempt to link with other organisations and try again in 2026.

If you know of a local community that could potentially take up an offer like this, and you’re willing to drive it, please let us know.

How content selection works

While we outreach to speakers, we also have a diverse panel review anonymised versions of all talk and workshop submissions to our Call for Participation. The panel is made up of over 35 people with varying interests and backgrounds, and every panel member recuses themselves when they believe they can identify the submitter. We intend to grow this panel in 2026.

Performances, installations, and youth workshops are difficult to review anonymously due to the content, so these are currently considered separately by the various teams.

Statistics

We intend to publish these statistics for each EMF, and we’ll try to do the same for previous years where we have data.

The data are gathered by an optional form that we request our speakers (and attendees) fill in. We ask three questions: age, gender and ethnicity, all three are optional. The response rates for each question are given at the bottom of the appropriate table.

Next year we will be adding a disability question to this form to capture that information (and help inform our accessibility work).

Here ‘speaker’ refers to anyone who has a proposal accepted (talk, workshop, youth workshop, performance or installation) through the official EMF CfP. It does not account for attendee content or lightning talks. ‘Response rate’ is the percentage of speakers who responded to that question.

A ‘reviewer’ is a member of our call for participation review panel, they review our anonymised proposals.

Invited Speakers only covers people who agreed to give a workshop or talk. We reached out to over 190 people about potentially giving a talk, but do not record demographic data on those who are not speaking this year.

These statistics are correct as of 2024-05-14, so the final published numbers may change slightly due to last-minute alterations in the schedule.

Totals

Age

Gender

Ethnicity

By type

Note that the totals here will differ from those for speakers, because some speakers have multiple submissions (e.g. a workshop and a talk).