35. Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig

Background

Also this year a Chaos Communication Congress was to take place, this time the 35th Congress. As last year, the Congress took place in Leipzig.

This year again I volunteered for the organisation of the heralds (moderators) and stage managers. These two teams have become more and more professional over the years and have organized themselves in the so-called SHOC (Stagemanager and Heralds Operation Center). The SHOC is the higher-level team that takes care of the processes within the teams.

The SHOC consisted this year from four persons: Katzazi, Coco, Lindworm and me. Thank you very much for your commitment and help!

Planningphase

This year, I was able to concentrate more on planning, as I didn’t have a c-base project that would also be done for the Congress. Accordingly, I started early to discuss this year’s processes and process changes with all other trades in the hall. This preliminary process proved to be very valuable, as it allowed us to integrate many suggestions from the video team (VOC), the translation angels and the other trades in the hall.

Especially the area of crowd flow management was important to me to improve, because at the 34c3 there were several unfavourable situations with too many guests at bottlenecks.

Fortunately, a new team was formed for this task, with whom we worked closely together.

Event

During the event, we made sure that all seats were filled in time, that the doors were closed before overfilling if necessary, and that all necessary teams in the hall were fully staffed and ready for operation. We also make sure that all trades have all the necessary information about the proceedings, that the stage is prepared as planned and that all lectures begin and end on time.

In general, our stage managers worked with the stage supporters to solve various minor and major problems before they occurred in order to get all the planned lectures on stage as smoothly and on time as possible.

The most important change this year was probably that we restructured the stage managers. There was only one stage manager per hall this year, but this one had between one and three assistants, whom we called Stage Supporter. This structure proved to be advantageous, last year we had some problems with “Bystander Bias” – the responsibilities were not clearly defined, theoretically all of the up to four stage managers were responsible – as a result it happened several times that all stage managers thought without bad intentions that someone else would take care of this or that detail. The new structure anticipates this and creates clear responsibilities.

The SHOC directly took care of 148 angels

• 42 Heralds
• 55 Stage managers
• 51 Stage supporters

This year we have supervised a total of 205 lectures or events on a total of 6 stages and ensured the punctual start and end. The CCC itself operated 5 stages (last year 4) and we also took care of the stage of Chaos West.

Unfortunately this year I caught a cold during the Congress, so I had to cancel the event on the 3rd day, but the rest of my team handled everything wonderfully and took over my shifts.

Success

The Congress this year went very well for the SHOC, there were no major problems or difficulties, almost all presentations started on time, there were hardly any delays. The changes introduced in the area of crowd flow management were also successful.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to all the participating angels – without your commitment this event would not have been possible.

Image Credit:  The header image is CC-BY-SA licensed and has been taken by a Flickr user and published on Flickr. It violates our photo rules because we don’t allow long shots or panoramic images like this. It was published anyway and was heavily blurred and pixelated by me before I published the picture again. I have added the license notice in the picture. Since the original is not in accordance with our photo rules, I will not link it.