Up until a week ago we were almost exclusively focused on choosing the location, and then preparing the basic infrastructure (power, sanitation, Internet, etc.) There are still many details to take care of, but we’re getting to a place where we have a solid understanding of our basic cost structure, and contacts with great suppliers. Some of these aspects may be worth a blog post of their own at some point; it is delightful to observe well-experienced networking geeks design and negotiate Internet infrastructure for a field!

Some of the things we did last week:

  • We’re aiming for a small ticket pre-sales round soon (to kick the tyres), with a more public round after that.
  • We’re planning our next site visit for Saturday 9 June. Jontyw will post an announcement soon.
  • We’re starting to research accessibility questions. Get in touch with the team (particularly Solexious and Russss) if you have experience in such matters or are planning on coming and have any special requirements.
  • We reviewed our team structure and made some refinements. We will grow the org team quite quickly, so this is currently one of the focus areas.

Community Outreach

We’re now starting to look at community and social aspects of the camp. We want to focus on making the camp a great social experience by bringing communities together, and giving them space to shape the event; and less on creating a conference that people “consume.”

We’ve seen incredible interest by the right kind of people already, and know that it will be something special. But a result of this approach is that we don’t yet have enough concrete things to show in our “programme” to excite even sceptics. I imagine this will change quite quickly, but also that things will stay fluid until the very end. We’ve already seen various plans by UK hackspaces to set up villages etc. Check back in a few weeks…

In concrete terms we’re now approaching the first communities and inviting them to shape the event. This could mean offering talks, workshops, performances, or starting a village (a tent community), or preparing ambitious installations, etc – you get the idea. Last week we sent the Call for Participation to all larger UK hackerspaces (get in touch with martind if you haven’t received yours!) and already received some very positive responses. We’re also starting to reach out to some larger European communities, as well as to our immediate social circles; and we encourage you all to do the same. And please tell us who we should get in touch with!

We’re also now starting to consider how we will coordinate our volunteers. An event like this is not possible to run without a lot of help by all participants. More updates on that at a later time…

Hugs & kisses, martind