Hacker News Reader

Comment by sirodoht | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to live in a world where interesting events like CCC have somehow more space (ie. more participants) every year, not less. I've only been once to CCC but I know that the quest to get a ticket is filled with stress and disappointment every year.

View on HN

I've regularly attended C3 since back when it was still in Berlin and I'm not sure growing the event every year is desirable. Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with the goal of making it more accessible to everyone and I know the "ticket lottery" is miserable, especially if you don't end up getting one.

But the overall vibe of the event definitely changed for the worse (imho) with the move to Leipzig simply because the venue there is mostly focused on trade fairs and thus just so much more wide-open with everything much further apart. In Hamburg you'd constantly run across people you know in the hallways due to the compact horizontal layout, and the overall atmosphere was just a bit cozier. It was still a great event in Leizpig, but for me at least it really didn't compare to the previous iterations in Hamburg.

It's definitely a difficult trade-off to make and I'm glad I'm not the one making these decisions.

Leipzig was huge but it was cool to see all the stuff different hackerspaces could do with the extra room that would be harder at smaller venues (e.g. the beamer on 50m of wall with the crowdedsourced inputs, some of the physics experiment setups)

I don't know how much of that is possible at the CCH

You can scale locations. In a fair area you can always add a hall until you run out of halls, then you move to a bigger fair in another city.

What doesn't scale is the people who organise everything. If they don't want to organise ever bigger events, then they are free to switch back to a smaller scale. It's not only the organisational overhead that increases, but also that a bigger event is not just a bigger event, but also becomes another type of event.

Agree about scale making qualitative differences in events, but CCC has been happy operating at larger scale organizationally. I disagree with a lot of the organizational politics with CCC, but they're amazingly good at organizing events, and those events are really good. Combination of the main org/structure, volunteers, and especially making it somewhat federated with other groups/chapters doing their own stuff during the event as well.

In this case CCH doesn't really have more space, and Leipzig sucked as a city to host events (no hotels/food/etc. immediately near the center, etc.). CCC is not so profitable as to get the truly top-end convention centers, and cares about the total cost/experience to participants (accommodations, food, side events, travel logistics). Hannover, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, and Munich have the biggest ones in Germany. Berlin is almost as big; I think it's really expensive to book but if I had the money that would probably be much choice for ideal CCC location. CCH is really quite small as congress centers go.

I cannot understand your concerns about hotel rooms and food tbh. There's a hotel and a shopping center neighboring the venue. Also going to the city center is just 2 stops by train away (or by tram, but it's a longer ride).

I've been on some local events which have grown through the years, and with size, everything became worse sadly... It started with 50, 60 people, you could go talk to the speaker, you could try out some gadgets, see the demos up close... Then it became bigger, more people, more organization, and in the end, it was the same as if I watched stuff streamed online, just less comfortable and more expensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com