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by aveao 534 days ago
There was only one other congress after the pandemic and that was 37c3 (last year). That one indeed did not sell out and was an outliar.

I did go to 36c3 (end of dec 2019, right before pandemic) and the difficulty of buying tickets was the same as this year.
1 comments
DanielleMolloy 534 days ago
Interesting that it did not sell out. I've heard there was a lot of concern in the community about covid.
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aveao 534 days ago
I think it was a number of reasons, covid was one of them.

- Congress on years where there's cccamp tends to be planned by people who are understandably more exhausted. 37c3 and cccamp23 were on same year and 37c3 slogan was appropriately "resource extension".

- The venue was back from Leipzig to Hamburg (CCH was doing renovations for a while, so it was moved to CCL for a few years).

- 4 years between events lead to both changes in the orga people, and general concern that the older set of people had been at this point less familiar with running an event of this scale ("can they still do it and make it feel the same?").

- Covid precautions were a divisive topic. Some didn't want precautions, some wanted more precautions. Ultimately some measures were taken, but none were mandatory. We have distributed free tests and masks last year, we'll do it again this year, though mainly aimed at volunteers, so you should bring your own mask and test if you can, see the info page^1 for full recommendations :)

All this lead to people being unsure if 37c3 would be good and not coming. But I think that trust has since been regained, seeing as this year sold out really fast (same as past years).

I think one other issue was that chaos community is getting older and many are having families, which makes going to congress between christmas and NYE difficult. We did, imo, really good outreach since then and now there's more young people joining chaos communities again. Still, coming to congress is costlier for younger people that earn less (175eur for ticket but cheaper options are available on request, plus 400-600eur in hotels, plus trains/flights/visas etc).

(I was/am part of the infection protection team at 37c3 and 38c3 but am speaking on personal capacity.)

^1: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/infos/corona.html

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