[cp-global] results of Berlin's first meta meeting

Hauke Laging hauke.laging at openpgp-schulungen.de
Mon Nov 4 02:08:15 GMT 2013


Hello,

as announced we had the first meta meeting in Berlin on Saturday. I would like 
to let you know what happened so that you can decide whether (and how) you do 
something similar in your area.

We announced the event about six weeks in advance on Berlin's cryptoparty.in 
page, on several mailinglists, on my site openpgp-schulungen.de and in its 
groups at Google+ and Facebook. As you probably know the former Berlin events 
had a lot of media coverage so we have several press contacts we could use for 
our press release. Unfortunately it seems that noone has mentioned this event.

In addition I have been spreading flyers for about a week in front of the 
computer science building of Berlin's Institute of Technology (TU Berlin). I 
did that in a very passive way: The flyers were A5 landscape format with a 
huge (46pt) heading over two lines so the students could easily read that 
while approaching me so that they could make a real decision whether they take 
the flyer or not.

I have spread about 280 flyers. I guess that between 10% and 20% of the 
students took one. One day I did that in front of the math building (one of 
the points with the biggest streams of students on the campus). Even though 
several times the amount of students compared to the CS building met me there 
I could spread just a share of the CS amount of flyers.

The 280 flyers resulted in exactly one of the eight participants (plus the two 
organizers). Most of them had read the announcement of the web page or the 
Berlin Cryptoparty mailinglist. The main aim of the event was to offer a 
special event for people who are interested in supporting CryptoParties (as 
instructor, organizer, advertiser or whatever).


We made two groups. Half of the participants discussed instructor problems. 
One of the results is a list of tools which can be explained at CryptoParties. 
This list puts each tool into a difficulty category:

https://www.cryptoparty.in/berlin/meta-meeting/tools

The other group discussed organizational problems. We agreed that finding 
locations for CryptoParties is not a relevant problem in Berlin so we skipped 
that. Most of us consider the problem to find new instructors as not so 
serious. We consider finding new participants the main problem. Thus we 
discussed possibilities for generating attention and determined the order how 
to proceed. We will start with contacting the computer science and math 
professors. In addition we will give the sociologists, political scientists 
and cultural scientists a try because someone in the group said that the 
awareness for the spy problem and the necessity of technical counteractive 
measures was now very high in these groups (which I am not sure about for the 
CS students...). When we have reached substantial support from those 
professors we will try to get a public statement of support from the head of 
the university. After that we will target schools.

At the end we combined both groups and explained the results to the others. We 
cannot tell yet how successful the event was with respect to its main aim: 
Getting more instructors and organizers for CryptoParties. E.g. the event did 
not result in the practical planning of new CryptoParty events.


At the moment we have not planned former events of exactly this kind. 
Announcing another event for people who want to become active would probably 
result in even fewer participants. But we have seen that it leads to good 
results if people who are already active meet in RL for working together on 
certain CryptoParty problems. As I have already mentioned on this list I will 
offer a monthly event starting on December, 2nd (der "Crypto-Stammtisch", 
http://www.crypto-stammtisch.de/ ) which shall cover these points. After the 
first event of that kind I will let you know its results, too.


CU

Hauke
-- 
☺ http://www.openpgp-schulungen.de/
XMPP (Chat mit OTR): hauke.laging at googlemail.com
XMPP (Chat mit OTR): hauke.laging at jabber.ccc.de
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