On December 27th to 29th, the 20th Chaos Communication Congress is going to take place in Berlin, Germany. I finally managed to release the 20C3 web site to the general public. A bit late, as usual.

I know the web site has some serious CSS issues with Internet Explorer but it validates and renders fine on all the standards-compliant web browsers (on the Mac). I haven‘t had enough time to concentrate on eliminating these issues. As the rendering is quite terrible on IE, something must be done, I know. If you are capable of catching some of the rendering bugs and pointing me to proper CSS hacks that I could apply, I would be very pleased to receive hints on this as my testing abilities on Windows are zero: no Windows machine around. I am a Mac-head beyond remedy.

The design is simple and uses some of the more advanced features of CSS2, like position: fixed and position: absolute to have a non-scrolling navigation interface and a table-less layout with good accessibility. I wouldn‘t say the design is a big hit. It should be simple and easy to read. Nothing more. The logo looks a bit like the Nine Inch Nails logo, but that wasn‘t intentional.

But let‘s talk about the Congress a bit. For five years, the Congress took place at Haus Am Köllnischen Park but the venue has been closed down and the team moved over to the brand new Berliner Congress Center (BCC) – and the Congress now moves as well.

So we are going to meet old friends again: the BCC – formerly known as the „Kongresshalle“ – was housing our five-day exhibition XXCCC (the 20th anniversary of the Chaos Computer Club in 2001. And the building to the left of Kongresshalle – known as „Haus des Lehrers“ – was the home of Blinkenlights, our interactive light installation (the link might be dead – we are having trouble with the name servers right now. it will be fixed soon).

So this is going to be an all-new experience for everyone of us. The new location has been recently reconstructed and is a real beauty of the 60ies stuffed with brand new equipment of the 21st century. And it has a marvellous view on Alexanderplatz and the cool Berlin TV tower. Bringing the Chaos Communication Congress to the very heart of Berlin is a big chance for the us and be sure we are going to make sure nobody is going to miss this. Hint hint :-)

The motto of 20C3 is „Not A Number“ which is a play with both the mathematical term and its philosophical meaning which should be obvious. It is partly inspired by a TV series called „The Prisoner„. The protagonist is an agent of the British secret service. After he quits his job, he gets hijacked and finds himself locked into a Village where nobody has a name – just a number. Listen to the famous words: „I am not a number! I am a free man!„

So much for now. I can only invite you to join. More news on the 20C3 in this blog in the coming days.