RC3 Summary

January 5, 2021

Hi friends of the chaos,

The 37th Congress has taken place from 27 - 30 December 2020 and due to the pandemic everything was remote. So the Chaos Congress got the name RC3. This was my very first Chaos Computer Club event that I attended. How great the days were and what I experienced, I describe in the next paragraphs.

Tag 1

Visited streams:

It's December 27th, 2020, and RC3 starts at 12:20. The intro was very cool. There was a summary of the year 2020 and besides Corona many interesting and unfortunately also sad things happened to which attention was drawn. It was also shown and made clear how much effort and how many people are actually involved in making the RC3 possible. Extremely cool.

The first talk I attended was 1pm "The History of the Corona Warning App". It was really exciting to follow how the German Corona Warn app has evolved, as I had barely followed it. I found it very cool that the conference was remote and I was partly in 3 streams at the same time to pick the best one. That would not work in reality ^^

At 14:30 my highlight stream was about "How to start a cooperative?". The topic of starting a cooperative interests me a lot, as I'm in the process of starting one with a few other developers. So it was really cool to learn in detail what a cooperative is and to hear about the experiences of people who have already founded one. For me it was very interesting to hear that cooperatives can probably help to save taxes in some areas and that cooperatives are probably underestimated in the general public, although they are something very great.

I attended many other streams on the day and it's always great to see people so excited to present about their topics.

Also extremely cool and fun and awesome was RC3 World which is a digitized two-dimensional world of the RC3 fairgrounds and more. You create a little avatar there and walk around with many others in a 2 d world. You can also talk to the others and gaze at each other via webcam if you get close enough. Extremely funny and cool. Among other things, the Chaos Spaces of Germany were modeled in the world and the Hacklabor is very well done (see cover picture).

Tag 2

Visited streams:

Today is Monday and the second day of rC3. My highlight stream today was the 15:00 "Hacker cooperative as a platform for chaos-related business" . Being in the process of starting a cooperative myself, it's highly exciting to hear about it. I found it a bit disturbing that the hacker cooperative presented there took a year to found the cooperative. I think that has a lot to do with the bureaucracy in Germany. However, I am optimistic that our cooperative will be founded more quickly.

Also very exciting was the 19:00 "Health is a social question" talks, which showed very nicely how the current German health system is ailing. E.g. that prevention plays a rather subordinate role. It also made me think about why patients are actually released back into their environment, which has made them so ill. This is exactly where one should actually start and address the environment / the living conditions of the patient.

Tag 3

Visited streams:

Today I didn't have that much time to watch streams because I was working on projects. In the evening I did some socialising at the rC3 World. I met some cool dudes from the Rostock Space. I realized that I know some of them from my time as a student in Rostock. The rC3 World collapsed at some point and it took a long time until it was available again.

Day 4

Today I couldn't visit any streams because I had to do a lot at work. But I was able to spend some time with friends in the world and watch some streams.

Summary

Many thanks to the organizers and contributors of rC3. It was my very first Chaos Computer Club event and it just knocked my socks off. There were many exciting streams and the world was awesome. For the fact that this was the first rC3, the relatively frequent technical marbles / failures are definitely forgivable.

Anyhow I hope for 2021 the C3 will take place in person again, but if not the rC3 is a great alternative! Thanks also to my buddy and experienced C3 congress visitor for all the little tips and the fun get-togethers that made my rC3 experience great :).

To the wonderful readers of this article I'm saying that feedback of any kind is welcome. In the future I will try to include a discussion and comment feature here. In the meantime, please feel free to send me feedback via my social media accounts such as Twitter or FaceBook. Thank you very much :).

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