CATS is a collective skillshare event, see how for more information on how it works.
History and context
CATS was originally organised as "Cascadia Anarchist Tech Skill-share (CATS)", "an opportunity for Northwest Anarchist and anarchist-inspired tech activists, geeks, sysadmins, programmers and web-designers to share their skills, learn from others, socialize, and make revolution." See the initial announcement for more details.
That event first took place in october 2003 on the west coast of turtle island (Seattle) then later in february 2004 in portland. Those events were a major inspiration to a whole generation of techno-activists.
More recently, a bunch (15-30) of crazy geeks met again on a boat trip in amsterdam and had an awesome time sailing, working together and exchanging ideas. This was following the controversial OHM2013, a hacker camp in the Netherlands where the subject of police collaboration was hotly debated. Wanting a safer space to organise, we figured we would do our own.
From there grew the idea of doing CATS again, this time on the east coast.
About the name
The name doesn't really matter, the spirit is what counts (see how) - but it's fun to have a cute name.
Collective is to replace the original "anarchist" since the "a" is now used to denote location. We could have well used other synonyms: collaborative, common, communal, communist (!), concerted, conjoint, consensual, cooperative, or even mutual, pooled, shared, united, but then it would say MATS, PATS or UATS and it wouldn't be as funny. We could also simply have kept "anarchist", but then it would have been AATS, which is also silly.
We chose the Appalachian mountain range because we believe in organising locally to change the world globally, while at the same time refusing the existing political nation state borders. Unfortunately, the Appalachians don't actually cover Quebec so much and that idea is due to a confused education of anarcat who believed that the Monteregian Hills are actually part of the Appalachian mountain range. Furthermore, the primary planned location for the meeting is actually in a totally different mountain range, the Laurentian mountains
Anyways, the point is to get people together in the north-east of turtle island.
What's turtle island? well, that's another story.