IF YOU ARE ALREADY FAMILIAR WITH CCC CONGRESS, THIS IS PROBABLY OF NO CONCERN FOR YOU :)

Chaos Communication Congress (C3), has become over the last 37 years the most important event on the planet for hackers, activists, technology enthusiasts and critics alike, to discuss a mix of technical and political issues.

It usually looks like a giant, 4 days 24/24 conference, but is in reality much more than that to its participants: a place to meet, to share, to discover, to tinker and to experiment. A place to organize, in a very disorganized way. :) A giant “living room” where many feel just free to be who they are. Great progress has been made over the years at benelovently including everyone. Last year 17.000 people participated in Leipzig!

Every group of participants is free to set up an “assembly” at C3, sometimes also called a “village”. It is usually a corner of a big room, attributed by the central organisation of the Congress, with tables and chairs and anything one can feel like bringing really. Some build domes, colourful art installations, giant toys, etc. or keep it a low profile place to gather and hang around in between friends (and also maybe find relief from the overwhelm and social anxiety that can arise from such an intense experience!).

This year like last year [because reasons], C3 will only happen online, over the traditional dates of 27th to 30th of December. Yet, some lovely organizers and their many supporters are cooking something very special: the “Remote Congress Experience” or RC3. One can expect that many smart and talented people would gather to share parts of their decentralized infrastructures in order to experiment wildly!

Part of RC3 will be “RC3 World”, a social online experiment taking the form of a very simple adventure/RPG game, with oldschool pixel graphix, accessed from a web browser.

Every assembly/village can have their own piece of map, interconnected with the other maps (and to a central lobby that dispatch visitors around in between maps) This decentralized “pixel world” will connect together different communities and activities, like some conference stages, discussion spaces and workshop areas, the assemblies themselves, and many crazy things that will be experimented continuously during these four days. This could add a little bit of entropy around isolated lives, allowing people to “bump into each other” and interact, to lose their track/focus from the main conferences and meet new ideas… maybe needed in such a strange and dark period!

Different areas of the map link to various resources and displays them in the web browser window as the game. Approaching a certain area of the map will open a website, a video communications through Jitsi, of sound files, audio streams etc. whether to mimic the conditions of discussions (like in a couch/lounge area), or to enable participation in workshops, conferences, panels, etc. using various pieces of decentralized infrastructure, etc.

rC3 will be a variety of distributed small local events in hackspaces with a joint program of streamed talks, online workshops, art, culture and various forms of networked togetherness.