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.
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!
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.
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.
Of course, EMF wouldn’t be what it is without you, giving great talks, making performances, putting up installations, and most importantly bringing yourselves!
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!
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!
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!
EMF is made possible by many volunteers, both before, during, and after the event. Learn more about volunteering at EMF.
You can chat with the EMF community on Matrix or IRC:
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.
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.
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.
We’ve already announced the Greenhouse on our blog, but here’s a little summary for those who missed it:
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.
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.
NullSector are looking for volunteers to assist with:
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.
If you would like to DJ in NullSector please make a submission via the Call for Participation.
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.
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.
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:
and our Silver-tier sponsors:
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.
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.
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!
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 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!
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.
The intergalactic growing pod will be located adjacent to the Lounge.
For The Greenhouse to work, we both need you to bring plants & take them home with you.
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.
Please label what you have brought (surprises are lovely, but it’s safest if everyone knows what is what).
Don’t forget to check in regularly during the event to keep an eye on the hydration of any growing offerings you’ve brought.
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).
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.
We are so looking forward to welcoming everyone back to our little calm green piece of Space!
We’d like to thank our three Gold-tier sponsors:
and our Silver-tier sponsors:
If you have a talk, installation, workshop, or performance you’d like to bring to EMF, now’s your chance to let us know:
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!
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.
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.
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
]]>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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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:
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
If you’d like to stay up to date over the next two years:
EMF would have been impossible without the support of our amazing sponsors this year.
Once again we are incredibly grateful to:
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.
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
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.
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.
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:
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.
That’s not to say we haven’t done anything this year. In addition to our usual outreach, we tried a few new things:
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
| All Speakers | Invited Speakers | Reviewers | total | 280 | 16 | 35 |
|---|
| All Speakers | Invited Speakers | Reviewers | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0-15 | 1 (0.41%) | 0 | 0 |
| 16-25 | 17 (7.0%) | 0 | 1 (4.2%) |
| 26-35 | 74 (31%) | 4 (31%) | 3 (13%) |
| 36-45 | 85 (35%) | 5 (38%) | 12 (50%) |
| 46-55 | 41 (17%) | 2 (15%) | 7 (29%) |
| 56-65 | 20 (8.3%) | 1 (7.7%) | 1 (4.2%) |
| 66+ | 4 (1.7%) | 1 (7.7%) | 0 |
| Total | 242 | 13 | 24 |
| Response rate | 86% | 81% | 69% |
| All Speakers | Invited Speakers | Reviewers | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Male | 155 (67%) | 9 (69%) | 9 (39%) |
| Non-binary | 21 (9.1%) | 1 (7.7%) | 5 (22%) |
| Female | 54 (23%) | 1 (7.7%) | 9 (39%) |
| Other | 2 (0.86%) | 2 (15%) | 0 |
| Total | 232 | 13 | 23 |
| Response rate | 83% | 81% | 66% |
| All Speakers | Invited Speakers | Reviewers | |
|---|---|---|---|
| White | 193 (93%) | 12 (92%) | 19 (86%) |
| Mixed | 6 (2.9%) | 1 (7.7%) | 2 (9.1%) |
| Black | 1 (0.48%) | 0 | 0 |
| Asian | 5 (2.4%) | 0 | 1 (4.5%) |
| Other | 3 (1.4%) | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 208 | 13 | 22 |
| Response rate | 74% | 81% | 63% |
Note that the totals here will differ from those for speakers, because some speakers have multiple submissions (e.g. a workshop and a talk).
| Submitted | Accepted | |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | 54 (9%) | 45 (13%) |
| Youth Workshop | 40 (7%) | 21 (6%) |
| Installation | 87 (15%) | 77 (21%) |
| Talk | 280 (48%) | 130 (36%) |
| Workshop | 125 (21%) | 86 (24%) |
| Total | 586 | 354 |
We’re only six days away from EMF. This is the last time you’ll be hearing from us before the gates open.
There’s some important information in this email - its a long one, so get a nice cup of tea.
The short version:
Our schedule has been announced! You can see the full timings at emfcamp.org/schedule.
Villages are still publishing their own content so there’s lots more to come! Please note all timings are subject to change - keep an eye on the schedule, or add your favourites feed to your calendar.
This year we’ll be allocating many workshop places by lottery. You can see which workshops require tickets by looking for the 🎟️ symbol in the schedule.
Enter the lottery by clicking “Request Tickets” on a workshop then selecting the number of tickets you need - each person may only win tickets for one workshop and one youth workshop. You can order your workshops in order of preference after applying.
The lottery will close on Wednesday 29th May. Any remaining or returned tickets will be available to book on the website from Thursday May 30th. Youth Workshops will allow unticketed first-come-first-served walk-ups for the remaining places.
Any workshops that don’t have the 🎟️ symbol are being run independently by villages and may have their own sign-up, or be first-come-first-served - check the workshop description!
EMF is entirely run by volunteers, and we need you to help. There are over a thousand volunteer shifts to fill, covering almost 4,000 hours. It sounds like a lot but if 50% of attendees take a shift, we’ll easily fill them all.
Please register to volunteer and sign up for shifts.
Volunteering not only gives you a warm fuzzy feeling, you also get a free meal from the excellent volunteer kitchen, hot and cold drinks, and a guaranteed ticket voucher for the next EMF.
It’s been rather wet over the last few months and the ground at Eastnor is quite soft. Please make sure you have good wet weather gear and expect it to get a bit muddy - bring some boots.
It can also get quite cold at night, so bring warm clothing and suitable sleeping equipment. Some people use an electric blanket!
If you’re coming in a vehicle, follow the directions of our marshals, and please stop and ask for help if your vehicle gets stuck.
Instead of a regular lanyard, our Tildagon badge is designed to use a USB-C to USB-C cable - simply plug the cable into both badge sockets and hang it around your neck.
In an effort to reduce waste we are not supplying cables with the badges. Please bring your favourite USB-C to USB-C cable with you, or you can use a lanyard from a previous event. We have some suggested cables in the badge documentation - including ones that light up!
Please read our health guidance before coming to the festival, and if you are ill with an infectious disease please do not attend EMF - we will happily refund your tickets!
Another reminder that there will be engineering work until 18:00 on Sunday 2nd June that will mean no trains leaving Ledbury and a rail replacement bus service instead. Our shuttle bus will run to Worcestershire Parkway while the engineering work is happening, but this will reduce its capacity. If you’re planning to leave by train, we recommend you leave on Monday if possible. More details on our travel page.
If you’re planning a meet up, workshop, chat, show and tell, or any other kind of activity you’d like to let people know about, add it to the schedule.
You can choose to host it in the lounge or bar, but this doesn’t reserve you space; if there are a lot of you it’s probably better to meet there and go elsewhere.
If you have registered a village you can also publish events happening in your village to the schedule - let everyone know what you’re up to!
Each day we run a lightning talk session - ten minute talks on any topic you like, open to anyone who wants to present!
If you would like to give a lightning talk, please sign up in advance. We’ll need you to supply a slide deck in PDF format so we can make the talks as fast as possible.
On Saturday afternoon Null Sector hosts an Electronic Music Open Mic-night (EMOM). Bring your synths, sequencers, stylophones, spectrums, and signal generators to play a short 15-minute gig for curious onlookers. The best acts will be given the chance to perform in an EMOM showcase on the main music stage.
If you’re interested in taking part please let us know.
We’d like you to bring two things this year: Plants, and interesting junk!
The charity Swap Shop is waiting to receive your unwanted tools, electronics, baffling machines, and unusual objects. Drop them off at the Swap Shop and take home some different ones instead.
We also want your contributions to the Community Cultivation Compilation - an exchange for tiny plants, offshoots, bulbs, and seeds. Bring a cutting and take home a new green friend 🌱
As always, you must be prepared to take home anything that doesn’t find a new owner - even if it photosynthesises!
On developer.emfcamp.org you’ll find a catalogue of data and programming interfaces we publish for you to play with - everything from information about talks to how many pints of beer have been served at the bar so far.
We love seeing what you do with it, and we’d love you to document your own things so others can interface with them too. Got an API for your robot? Let us know!
Following the screening of Hackers on Saturday night, director Iain Softley will be answering your questions …and judging the best Hackers cosplay outfit.
Pack your pager, rollerblades, and red eye shadow. We’re hacking the planet.
We love your photos! We love seeing them! If you take photos at EMF and are willing to share them with us, please fill in this form.
We particularly appreciate people helping to document the festival for our archives. If you’d like to volunteer for the EMF photo team, get in touch.
In addition to the DECT network, we’ll be running our own 2G mobile phone network. SIM cards will be available to buy from the shop and should work in most GSM phones. Find out more on gsm.emf.camp.
If you already have a SIM from a CCC event (not a plant) please follow these instructions.
You can also follow us on Mastodon at @emf@emfcamp.org for live updates.
We also have updates from many of our teams:
We wouldn’t have got this far without our amazing sponsors, without them EMF would be impossible.
Once again we are incredibly grateful to:
See you in the field!
Love, The EMF Team
]]>This year we decided (in a pub, where else) to do the arcade at EMF a little differently, and create a space for indie and small games developers from the EMF and adjacent community to showcase their games.
Some absolutely incredible games and game developers have signed up to be part of it, including games that are climate and environment themed, games that use odd alternate controllers, and some smash hit indie darlings you might just have heard of.
However, we do still need some help to laser cut the arcade cabinets that will house the machines. If you have access to a laser cutter and are willing to help us out, read on!
The arcade will use bartop cabinets for 24” monitors, and needs 16 complete sets of cabinet components. Each cabinet is 17 components, needs to be cut on 6mm plywood, and fits within a 1220x2440mm sheet. If you:
then we would be very grateful for your help, and can provide a set of plans that fit your bed, providing it’s at least 700x600.
Cutting all 16 is a big commitment, so we don’t expect that, and are thankful for any that you can produce. As you may have heard, sponsorship and budget are tight this year, so if you are willing to cover the cost of any cabinets you produce, we would be delighted to consider you a sponsor and supporter of the arcade, but if you can’t, just let us know. We have left a prominent spot on the cabinet for supporters to engrave their logos, and can display logos and URLs in the arcade programme, alongside the amazing game lineup.
Please contact installations@emfcamp.org, or message jna_sh on irc/element.
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