The genie has been out of the bottle for about a week now: a group is getting together to organise the WhatTheHack sucessor. For those of you who don’t know, WhatTheHack was the 5th in a series of four-yearly Dutch outdoor hacker events. Earlier it became apparent that the crew that organised WhatTheHack was not inclined to repeat the feat in 2009, the scheduled year for the next event.

As it happens, i’m implicating myself as quite an important part of the organisation of har (the working title for now), and tonight we had our first meeting. At first, it seemed that a lot of people agreed that the event should happen (to quote Dutch hacker guru Rop Gonggrijp: ‘our events have been and continue to be important milestones in hacker culture and .. they serve as places in space and time for the hacker community to get together‘) but none were too inclined to spend some serious time on it.

Tonight, however, it turned out we have (in my eyes) enough critical mass to make this thing happen. A group of around 15 people got together, with some more not being able to make it on such short notice but very eager to join. Of those 15 a handful is really diving into this project, while others have pledged whatever time they can free. We have a nice mix of “old-timers” and “newbies”, people who have been around since hip or even before, and newbies who have jumped on the bandwagon around hal2001 (even though i had a subscription to hack-tic, my first event was hal2001 so i’m one of the newbies).

I’m glad we will have an event in 2009. I have been looking forward to it since 2005, although i didn’t fathom then the role i would take in this new event. Time is short though, slightly more than a year. The next weeks will be spent creating rough budget plans, scouting locations. And then there’s the program.

Although we only have been at it for 1.5 weeks now, people are mailing that they will come, want to volunteer and are happy that the event is being planned! We might not be the same people that organised it in 2005, 2001, 1997, etc.. (although that is not entirely true of course, some of us have been around from the very beginning), our hearts are with the event.

2009: Hacking At Random!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 00:16 and is filed under English, International, Science 'n stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.