It’s time again to update you all on some of the things we’re currently working on. Much of this is still evolving, but we’re now getting to a point where certain aspects are becoming more and more clear. As you may know our meeting minutes are always posted on our wiki where you will find many more details about our progress.

The photos in this post were taken during our recent site visit, have a look at the full Flickr set: “Pineham Park Site Visit.”

General Updates

First off we’re now starting to keep track of all the communities that are attending the event. We still haven’t started promoting the camp in a big way, but already have confirmed attendance by: London Hackspace, Nottingham Hackspace, BuildBrighton, Reading Hackspace, dorkbotlondon, dorkbotsheffield, dorkbotcardiff, MzTEK, Surrey and Hampshire Hackspace, Edinburgh Hacklab, Faculty Unix / Funix, Milliways, Code Club, and a few others. Let us know if your community is planning to come as well by replying in this mailing list thread: “Who is coming to EMF? Let’s start a list.”

After having talked to the first communities and some internal discussion we’re currently busy cleaning up how we present ourselves. In the last weeks we learned a lot about how to explain the idea of the camp to new people, and we will update the website accordingly. As part of that we’re also working on an updated event description. You can see a draft on our wiki. This will become a starting point to create all kinds of other documents.

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Ticket Sales and Pre-Sale Deposits

You may already have seen our previous announcement of the ticket pre-sales that we started a few weeks ago. Pre-sales are going well, but as mentioned we need to sell a few more so we can cover the next weeks of deposits (for e.g. the camp site, Internet infrastructure, generator, and other basic camp infrastructure.) If you’re planning to attend then please participate in the pre-sales, your £30 deposit will get you a £5 discount of the final ticket price.

Good news for all European attendees: as of a few days ago we’re now also accepting payments to a Euro account without requiring an international bank transfer at a pre-sales deposit of €40. Note that it may take us a few days to process your payments. (On a related note, Jasper asks me to curse banks for not supporting online banking in 2012.)

Full ticket sales are coming very soon, we’re currently working on a website update with some improvements to the payment process and many small tweaks. You can have a look at our Github issue tracker for the website, and note that we do accept pull requests :)

We’re now also reviewing what it will take to allow children and teenagers to attend. Alex (yaxu) is now helping us with this; there are a number of open questions, but we will post updates as we learn more.

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Event Structure

We will soon start moving more of our time towards actual event (talk/workshop/session) planning. My personal impression is that while there will be centrally scheduled talks/workshops/other activities, many of the most interesting bits will emerge in the moment. This is a weakness (we don’t know how to describe that in advance) but also a natural strength (we already know that there will be many interesting participants from different backgrounds who will make stuff happen just by being there and getting excited.)

Consequently we’re currently re-thinking the event structure. Meaning: to us it now is becoming more important to say which organisations are going to be attending; and to then give camp attendees channels for collaboration (a stronger focus on villages, unconference tracks, work/hack spaces, the social experience.) Less formal conference, more organic community gathering.

I’m personally very excited about this part, but as I say, there’s much to be figured out first. Let us know if you’d like to help with that :)

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Want to help out?

We’re a community-run non-profit event. Want to help organise the camp? Join the mailing list, introduce yourself on IRC, participate in our weekly planning meetings. For details see the Contact page, have a look at our Teams and their open positions, and the plans we have for camp volunteers.

Tally ho, martind