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We all knew the Chaos Computer Club’s congress would not happen this year. The big challenge is to find a way to organize something comparable in a more, well, remote and social distanced fashion.

In the past weeks I have contributed my two cents. From the early planning, the pre-meetings in Jitsi and Mumble and finally, on location at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality in the Stadttheater Dortmund with professional studio and broadcasting equipment around.

Though we just were only 4-5 people effectively in a huge hall full of displays and technology, we felt a glimpse of congress atmosphere on the set. The following picture shows my mobile workplace at the Digital Academy.

Mixing, editing and broadcasting of the presentation “The Mission of the MV Louise Michel”. Technically quite interesting: The herald came from somewhere in Germany, the crew was on the ship in a Spanish Mediterranean port, the meeting was held in Jitsi, live-mixed and edited with OBS in Dortmund, streamed worldwide by the CCC, everything done with open-source software.

Where I usually display my Zammad ticketing system at my home office, I watched the streams remotely joined by some IT nerd friends.

Despite initial problems, occasional interruptions and even a fully-blown DDOS attack against the CCC DNS servers, everything worked out pretty well when considering there was no preliminary run, a lot of improvisation and little experience with such remote events of this size with so many distributed and decentralised actors and studios.

And even though I chuckled about the gamification in 2D World, one morning I ran into an American by chance and we had an enjoyable, hour-long English spoken conversation in Jitsi.

Nevertheless, I am looking forward to the time when we all can meet again without a mask.

With many new impressions and new experiences, I am heading to 2021.

Stay healthy!
Tomas Jakobs