I spent my first day at What The Hack and I can say the atmosphere is great. Most of the stuff is already set up and our Chaos Village is coming along nicely as well.

The volunteer teams are very effective and they have set up the tents in a very short time. So we already see a small Hack City arise.

No official Internet so far. Just the Orga Network allows outbound communication. However, the DECT phone system is in place for a couple of days already so you can make phone calls all over the field and get called from the outside as well (there is even a flaky outbound gateway but I haven’t tested that yet).

CCC groups are pretty strong at What The Hack. Apart from the POC, our community runs the Wireless Network (WOC), the First Aid Team (CERT) and the Chaos Village of course. The Chaoswelle is present with huge antennas. And André, the art brain behind the Camp’s light decoration, and his team are responsible for the light at What The Hack as well. Last but not least, the conference planning is done with Pentabarf, our new planning software.

Okay, enough bragging for now. I get back on the field taking care of this and that. We are going to lift the roof blanket on our huge dome tent today.

I have been far too busy to blog and had nothing really to say but now the immediate future is clear and there are quite some public activities I can look forward to that I’d like to share with you.

First we’re going to What The Hack, the upcoming open air hacker conference in The Netherlands. We’re about to leave this weekend to have enough time to set up our Chaos Village. We are going to build a pretty nice space so don’t forget to check it out when you are there.

At What The Hack I am going to do a talk on day 2 about Pentabarf, my pet project of the last 12 months. Sven and I are going to present the current state of affairs, where it’s all heading and why we think we should start by rewriting it first. I am sure I am going to reflect on general aspects of conference organization within the hacker scene.

A preliminary conference program has been posted to the What The Hack website. It shows a lot of promise and will definitely grow to an even more impressive line-up soon.

You might notice the visual similarity to the 21C3 schedule which has its cause: the WTH program committee is using our freshly developed software Pentabarf which is still in its infancy but is about to evolve to a full-blown web-based open source conference planning tool.

Also, the WTH crew managed to set up a public wiki for the participants. There had been a Plone-based wiki before, but now they’re using MediaWiki which is a much more mature system and much easier to use.

I fell in love with MediaWiki last year and since then it has been our primary tool for internal and public communication and documentation. For events addressing numerous participants a public wiki is just plain cool. So I am glad the WTH crew is following the same path we took for 21C3.

Captain! Incoming message: What The Hack Is Going On!

See you all in The Netherlands the end of July. This is going to be the party of the summer.

Jörg pointed me to an interesting spin. Maybe they just do it with their servers. Performance is an issue there and the market is totally different and wouldn’t affect the home user where the PowerPC still makes sense.

In the end, we’re all clueless. At least, these events start to radiate suspense again.

A dutch mayor considers the upcoming What The Hack open-air hacker conference a public threat and does not want to issue the necessary permit for the event that is about to take place at the end of July. Read all about it in the official press release at the conference site. You can read the letters so far online as well.