Logistics

When

Update: we never got around to doing this in 2014 as we wanted, so this is still at the planning stage! --anarcat 2014-12-24

The event should be between 5 and 7 days long, so people who want to stay longer can and others can leave early.

We decided it would take place during the 3 first weeks of July, while taking care not to conflict with HOPE (July 18-20 2014) and Toorcamp (July 9-13 2014).

If we decide to do it in the US, we should plan it so people can go to HOPE without crossing the border again.

Where

The where page is the place to discuss location issues!

How

The debrief of the autumn session outlined a few decisions we need to make:

  • do we want internet or not? at least a local network was proposed - consider a library box or pirate box and document it here!
  • do we want a shared or private space? a private space was appreciated
  • do we want more explicit facilitation? an Open Space was proposed
  • how do we plan food? it was difficult to organise the first time and a few people ended up doing a lot of the work

See also the general how page for our broad organising principles.

Food should be either vegetarian or vegan, making sure the vegan option is always available. It "made sense" during the autumn session and we did not see why we should change that.

Who

Who was by far the main issue of the first meeting. A lot of things were said, but we finally agreed on a few points:

  • We need to write a "manifesto", or a least an explicit text which lists the values we support. This is important to create a safe-space.
    • Anti-racist
    • Anti-capitalist
    • Anti-patriarchy
    • Prepare to be challenged!

We decided to keep the event to a word of mouth scale. This means we will not publicly advertise for the event, but we should talk about it to the people we think fulfill the aforementioned "requirements" of the "manifesto".

The event will have a soft maximum of 25 people. This means we will plan for 25, but will not refuse more people. There might be more than 25 registered persons, but this does not imply there will be more than 25 persons present simultaneously.

We also talked a bit about a way to veto someone who we think should not come, but did not reach a definitive answer on the subject.

Preparation meetings

First meeting

We met in Montreal on February 20th to prepare the summer camp. The resulting decisions were added to this page.

Second meeting

We plan to meet again on March 2nd at 18h. The availability has yet to be confirmed, but our first choice is ASSÉ's offices:

ASSÉ's offices, 2065, rue Parthenais, local 383 Montréal, (Québec) H2K 3T

Video conference setup is quite nice there, so if people want to beam from elsewhere, they can!

Transportation

This was mostly used to plan transportation last time, so let's do the same thing again!

  • anarcat - car with 5 places, ...
    • seat 2
    • seat 3
    • seat 5
    • seat 4
  • ...

Learning from the past

We did this before! Here's what worked and what didn't...

Worked

  • awesome location outside the city
  • a library! having a space to dump and share books (or just any data!) is awesome - some suggested a PirateBox but even a simple FTP server works
  • running and drinking
  • backup hygiene - let's do it again, this time bring your devices and external hard drives!
  • baking bread - they were very tasty!
  • ping pong - was amazingly funny
  • name that bird - a "chickadee" is a "mésange" in french!
  • the boombox - the jambox, it is awesome, even though it can't work without freaking pulseaudio apparently
  • papers - bring big sheets of paper again!
  • 16 is a good size

See autumn for the full debrief and session list.

Didn't work so well

  • no food organisation - we need to plan at least the first 2 days
  • no network setup - having some time to setup a basic network would have helped with a lot of workshops
  • no facilitation - having at least an open space would have been better
  • keysigning party - didn't happen!
  • if there's no internet, at least bring all the software in the universe (aka a Debian Mirror)
  • split noisy and sleepy/relaxation areas explicitely