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You have never organized a moderate or large conference. Your list doesn't even cover all major areas. No logistics? No electricity, network and video recording
by Ao7bei3s 11y ago
You have never organized a moderate or large conference. Your list doesn't even cover all major areas. No logistics? No electricity, network and video recording? None of the legally-required (depending on venue + number of attendees) professional personnel (event technicians, medical, fire, maybe an electrician. optionally security, cleaners). Not even insurance? Not even gaffer tape (not kidding, it's expensive)! (And I'm assuming your volunteers have enough time for all the time-intensive tasks.)
Attracting visitors is hard. Getting good speakers is harder. You can't just let the "evangelists" speak, or your talks will be advertisements. Worse than sponsors!
Low-cost, single-track, single-evening events for fifty people or so (= small event) are possible. They'll just not have any significant impact. (They'll definitely not have an impact without lecture recordings.)
I can say from experience that low-cost, non-profit, moderate (500+ people) events are possible even without listed sponsors or paid talks but have to be grown over many years and require goodwill from everyone (venue + various organizations and student groups) around.
And Congress is special, you can't duplicate it easily. It's grown over decades, it's the largest European hacker conference now (and btw: so that niche is filled now). They know in advance that they'll sell all tickets. It's prestigious. It attracts top-notch speakers. That would have attended anyway, of course. _Everyone_ _wants_ to help (time, money, equipment, and favors you can't just buy with money). It's not for profit. Dozens of volunteers begin working on it days to months before the Congress, a select few full time. Some are experts; you couldn't afford to pay them. Multiple hundreds of visitors volunteer on-site, working for the fun of it, free water and a special t-shirt. And it still costs 90€/ticket.
- josh2600 11y agoThanks. I was about to chime in with how ridiculous events of all kinds are... They're just so hard and nothing ever goes according to plan. One of my favorite phrases is "You can't spell 'party' without 'disaster'" which is something people only understand if they've thrown a big thing before.
- Eridrus 11y ago> largest European hacker conference now (and btw: so that niche is filled now) There are quite a few European hacker conferences and CCC's ties to hackers (in the computer security sense) are getting weaker as it gets more political and less technical.
- tobltobs 11y agoPlease name at least one conference which has a similar number of participants, ah forget that even 10% would surprise me. The CCC was political since its beginning.
- Eridrus 11y agoObviously nothing of the same scale, and yes it was always political, but the balance is shifting away from security to all of their other tracks, I counted up the talks from last year and only 25% were in the Security track vs 45% from 23c3. There were 67 hacking talks at 23c3, and 29 Security tracks at 32c3, it's very clearly on the downhill as there are less talks, and people become less interested in submitting and attending.
- Ao7bei3s 11y agoThe second largest European IT-related conference is FOSDEM (5000 participants); of course it has a different focus. But it's more productivity, less party. Then there are conferences like HITB Sec Conf that are much smaller, but focus exclusively on security - many (probably most) Congress attendees don't really have a security/hacking background, so I'm not sure the total number of attendees is a good metric for "is it a good security conference?". Though Congress does get all the high-profile talks. And there is no European hacker conference with nearly as much visibility as C3.