| SHA 2017 | Created: 20.08.2017 09:05 Last modified: 27.08.2017 10:30 |
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I was recently visiting
SHA 2017 ("Still
Hacking Anyways"), a "Hacker camp"
in the Netherlands. Now others have posted articles
about how great that was, I will instead focus on
what I do best: Ranting about what I did not like
about it.
The coin systemThe bar and the food court insisted on using a system of plastic coins. You could only pay with these plastic coins there. You could only get multiples of 10 coins == 10 Euro out of machines, either with cash or credit-/debitcard. You could not change the coins back, so any leftover coins at the end of the event became worthless plastic waste, and they would keep your money.This felt like a huge ripoff, and apparently it was intended as a such. The only reasoning Orga could provide for this crap was "safety of bar personnel" (?How?! By making sure they don't cut themselves on these sharp Euro coins?) and "Ensuring the food vendors pay the share of their revenue they have to pay". Wow, those are great reasons to rip off and piss off 3650 people! To add insult to injury, the machines handing out these coins were designed badly - they would ALWAYS spit out the coins in a way that half of them landed on the ground in front of the machine, and you had to pick them up from the dirt. They tried to fix it by "improving" the output-chamber with duct-tape, but to no avail. It's not that I could not afford the loss of 9.50 Euro through this ripoff, but the whole scheme makes me angry. I expect such things at a commercial festival, not at a not-for-profit hacker camp. In fact, it pisses me off so badly, that should I visit the successor-camp in 2021, I will not buy a supporter-ticket again (you could voluntarily pay more for your ticket, so that others who could not afford the regular price could get cheaper ones). So congratulations - 9.50 Euro earned, 100 Euro lost. And last but not least, I wonder if some people used the plenty available 3D-printers to fight ripoff with forgery. The food court...was inadequate. Not because the food was bad, most of it was actually pretty good, but because it lacked both choice and capacity. After the huge announcements on the SHA blog before the event about how great the food court will be, this was especially disappointing.There essentially was:
And you would also have to stand in line for a very long time, because there was not nearly enough capacity, at least in the first two days. I think by day 3 most visitors had given up on the food court and acquired other food sources, because queues were tolerable then. They also opened too late: On day 1 at around 14:00, when the place was crawling with people, who had mostly just arrived there after a long trip and were very hungry, only the "Holy Crepe" was open. The poor girl manning (haha) the stand was completely overrun. While I was standing in line (for what felt like an hour), she started telephoning. Now I don't really understand dutch, but it sounded a bit as if she was desperately trying to order supplies. And indeed, when I came by later, the stand was closed and a handwritten sign there that they would reopen in an hour (spoiler alert: they reopened an hour later than announced). If you like conspiracy theories, the inadequacy of the food court might at least partially have been on purpose: Because the angels (the voluntary helpers) would get really great food as a reward. "So you don't want to starve? No problem, sign up voluntarily here..." The terrainI don't even know where to start here.Perhaps by explaining why the Orga liked it so much: Because it had a lot of infrastructure already in place. There already were a few toilets and showers. Also, water and drain for the additional toilets and showers was already there, they only had to place the containers and connect them up. Even some fibre cables across different parts of the site were already in place. And there was also a fibre to the outside world that permitted the camp to have a 100 Gigabit Internet uplink. I'll also gladly admit that it was spacious, and that the fact that it had its own harbour was pretty cool. Sadly, this is where the list of what was good about the terrain ends, and the extremely long list of what wasn't starts. The biggest problem was that the terrain is just very bad for camping. Large part of the ground consists of sea clay. Water does not drain there at all. That means that after a rain shower, the water will stay there for a very long time. Even one day after a rain shower there are still puddles in many parts of the terrain. When people said they would need rubber boots, at first I thought they were joking. They were not. Rubber boots really were needed. As it rains pretty much every day in the Netherlands, and it had rained constantly for a week before SHA, pretty much 50% of the terrain was actually unusable for camping. Among them the biggest fields, where they had pretty much placed all the normal villages. They worked around it a bit by moving the fire lanes into the worst affected parts, but the rest still was more of a mud-fest than I would have liked. The fields on the sea-side of the dyke did not have this problem: They have a very sandy ground, and dry off very quickly after rain. They were also well-protected from the wind (by the dyke). But only half of them (Hopper and Snowden) could be used, because the others (Engelbart and Zuse) had not been provided with power or network. There also would not have been enough toilets and showers on that side of the dyke, they were already in short supply with the little usage those fields got. Sadly, Orga did not change plans and put these fields to good use after it had turned out how bad the other parts of the terrain were. They would probably have been used if there had been basic infrastructure - Snowden Field was totally crowded, and Zuse right next to it was just empty. The fields worst affected by flooding were the ones that had been designated for the "Family Village", which was not a normal village but a huge area for families with little kids, providing some entertainment for them. Their planned fields (Babbage, Boole, Clarke) weren't even mud anymore, but more of a swimming-pool. So Orga moved the Family Village to different fields, namely Rhodes and Wilson. But there was a problem with that: Each field had been assigned a (maximum) noise level, with the loudest fields being in the southwest (Torvalds, Turing, Wozniak), and decreasing when going away from there. The villages were placed on the fields depending on how much noise they wanted to make. The Family Village had been placed in the very north, in a very quiet area. But due to the move, they ended up right next to the maximum noise area, seperated only through a few trees. The predictable result? Nonstop bitching from Family Village about the noise from the designated noisy area. So noisy area was ordered to not be noisy anymore. Well, the wiser head gives in. But the terrain was problematic even when it was dry: the paved roads had a lot of dirt on them (probably the dried mud). And because it was also very windy, the wind blew that stuff into your face multiple times every day. It wasn't very pleasant. Due to the bad ground the terrain was also not suitable for campervans. They were only allowed in a few places next to the paved roads, and there were less than 100 camper spots in total. Those few slots were essentially reserved for families and handicapped people. That meant that the majority of people that wanted to come with a camper could not, and those that managed to get a spot were placed far away from their friends. It also meant that families that came with a camper could not join Family Village. The parkingThere would be only parking for a few cars on site, so for SHA a whole parking lot had to be built in a field nearby. But as the ground there was just as inferior as on the camp, this was a complicated effort, including multiple truckloads full of metal plates to build "roads" from, and bridges over the ditches around the field. As you can imagine, this was very expensive, and a parking ticket cost a whopping 42 Euros. And that is said to just barely have covered the cost. For that price you got parking in a muddy field from which you had to walk more than 1 km over an equally muddy and not properly lit (at night) path to the actual event. At least there sometimes was a luggage shuttle, but it would only drive to and from one end of the parking lot, which meant you would still have to carry your stuff a few 100 meters to/from the pickup/dropoff point; and as the name implies, it was for luggage, not for people, so while your luggage was shuttled, you would have to walk - and hope to find your luggage at the other end of the trip.The restrictionsThere was a huge amount of restrictions imposed, some by the owner of the site, some by the municipality as a precondition for the permit. These were including but not limited to:
The teardownThat one was really schizophrenic. Because on the one hand, Orga wanted everyone out of the terrain as fast as possible. On the other hand, they did everything to slow the process of leaving down.The official end of the event was at 16:00 on August 08. But cars were not allowed onto the field before 18:00. They did not adapt these plans when it became clear that there would be a rainshower of epic proportions around 17:00, i.e. people weren't allowed to get their stuff out while it was still dry. And the shower was really bad, all my clothes and even the contents of my backpack were completely soaked just from walking to my car. And even after 18:00 you could not just drive onto the terrain, park near where your stuff was, and load. There was only a limited number of cars allowed on the terrain at the same time, and each of them had to be accompanied by an angel driving in front of it on a bicycle. Kudos to those angels - as the site was large, they had to cycle at least 2 km per car, so they were probably dead after their shift. In order to guarantee some throughput, they actually had angels check that people had already packed their stuff before letting them on the terrain by car, but that naturally was binding further resources. As you can imagine, there was "a little" queue of cars as villages tried to load their stuff on that evening and the next morning. Even without the delays during the loading of stuff, those that had a longer trip ahead could not realistically start that trip on the same day, they had to stay another night. As an example, my way home is about an 8 hour drive, that is if there is no traffic, and I sure as hell won't go on that trip starting at 21:00 while already tired. In a way, Orga seemed to be aware of that, because they requested that the site be vacated by 12:00 the next day. That would have been pretty reasonable. However, according to reports "on the internet" (I did not experience this first-hand as I spent the night in a hotel), they then started to turn off the power grid and locked most of the toilets that same afternoon. So people spent the last night in the dark and had to take long hikes on unlit paths to go to the toilet. If you want to motivate people to leave, turn off the network, but turning off power and light at night is close to criminal assault. the factory firmware for the badgeEvery visitor got a nice electronic badge, with an e-paper display and an ESP chip, so the thing had WiFi. The problem with that was the firmware that was on it when it was handed out. If you turned it on for the first time, it would automatically start a wizard to set your (nick-)name, because after all, displaying that is the main purpose of a badge. But there was no explanation of which key would do what, and if you guessed wrong, you would set your name to some nonsense or (most likely) the empty string, in which case it would display some default (the name of one of the developers). The problem was that you could not ever call that wizard again or change that nick before successfully connecting to the SHA WiFi and downloading and installing a firmware update. In other words, your name badge was unable to perform its most basic task, namely "displaying your name", before "phoning home" to the cloud. I found that quite remarkable, as I would have expected this kind of braindead reliance on the cloud from a gadget made by Google or Apple, but not from something at a hackercamp.The weather...mostly during buildup and teardown. There was a storm on Day 0, teaching a few tents how to fly; and both buildup and teardown were accompanied by heavy rain.The weather inbetween was actually pretty nice, some sun (enough to get sunburnt if you weren't careful), some clouds, an occasional small rain shower (well it's the Netherlands), not too hot. It however became extremely cold immediately after sunset. It's been a while since I wished I had my winter coat with me and not just my between-seasons-jacket in August. EOFThat's all I can think of for now, but I might add more later.So was SHA a disaster? No, it wasn't. But it also wasn't particularly good. I have also posted a few pictures here. |
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