 Next talk. The next talk is called Divock Forever. As you have to know, RC3 is not the first event which happened online in the chaos orbit. As the pandemic has led to the cancellation of various chaos events, a series of online gatherings has been happening during whole 2020. Divock is also known as digitally distributed online chaos and is quite fundamentally different from yet another conference moved online by necessity. So in this talk you will get a behind the scene review highlighting a variety of perspectives. Now we welcome our speakers who speak as representatives for the Divock organization. Welcome STB, Benjamin Wand, Prüpen and DJ Spock. And I have a warm virtual applause for you. The stream is yours. Thank you very much, Sandra. Hello. We are DJ Spock, Benjamin, STB and Prutl, that's me. And we are going to tell you the story of Divock. The story starts when COVID started happening for many of us in early 2020. And then EasterHack didn't happen. And then later on the GPN didn't happen. And MRMCD didn't happen. So instead when COVID started to happen, Divock started to emerge. That's digitally distributed online chaos. And as I just said, it all started from EasterHack. EasterHack 2020 had been well ahead in its planning when it came clear that it wouldn't be happening after all. But there was always energy that had gone into preparations and there were talks submitted and accepted. And there was a team ready to go. So go they did with less than four weeks of preparation. And they invented Divock. That's not a substitute, but it turned out something entirely new. And it included many bursts. It included many self-organized sessions, which after the event officially had ended, seemed to just continue forever, hence Divock forever. The event had proper chaos feeling with your very own deck. And overall, it had the excitement of something new. And then moving on to May, Divock happened again. That was the party edition this time with a music stream, more self-organized sessions, and a notable first this time, the quiet cube that came to Divock for the first time for September 2020. Next slide, please. We moved from the home launch to push to talk with another set of many firsts. For the first time, when EasterHack still was drawing on the CFP, well, when Hidden Service was still drawing on the CFP for EasterHack, now we had a Divock with its own call for participation. And RC3 was starting to be on the horizon. So a number of teams were starting to have test runs, for example, the kit space, the awareness team, we had a heaven, we had angels. So as a consequence of that, the organization team was larger than at previous Divocks. The communication needs changed. We did active onboarding. And so first to get into the details here, Benjamin is going to be telling you about the organization. And then we move on to technical solutions with STB. Benjamin, please. Hello. The management aspects that I'll describe now mostly represent push to talk because that was the Divock with most team and somewhat the most professional event and actually required something like management. We use pads for almost everything to do with planning, even the slides of this talk run on Kodi MD. Obviously we had a wiki, but we didn't use that much for the planning except for some things to do with speaker communication and t-shirt sizes. There was a metapad and you see example of that on the right side of the slides now. The metapad is the central hub. Everything like every medium relevant to it was listed there, except for the date of the next Bumble, which was announced in the rocket chat because of my obsession with single source of truth. One might use a wiki, but ultimately pads are more collaborative and that made the onboarding of new members easier with the simple permission structure, which I think helped to make people feel invited. Using pads means lower entrance barrier. Next slide, please. Here roughly you see the pads of Divock push to talk. The metapad lists all the pads and all the pads linked to the metapad. Most of the time we had Mumbles once a week and the last two weeks more often the Mumble pads existed early and more about that later. The next thing we had in the metapad was a person's list. He used an imaginary one. At Divock push to talk we had 21 people. When someone joined Divock meeting for the first time we asked them what do you want to do and wrote it into the person's list regardless how insignificant. I think it's very important to ask what do you want to do and not what are you good at. This comes with an optimistic conception of hacker where when someone is interested in something they can learn it, it invites to explore and exploration makes happy. Also we never had to babysit anybody's motivation because they were already doing what made them happy. And maybe that sounds trivial and as if you're already doing it, but you might ask yourself when are the occasions where you ask what should we do and you could observe the burden that develops compared to things where you started from what do I want to do. I feel a bit obliged to add that this type of communication built on voluntariness and intrinsic motivation was not always perfect from the beginning. We actually had two teams that are more used to be approached like we need you appear and in those cases the communication was a bit slow at first. However I'm convinced that working based on intrinsic motivation is a must have and volunteer driven events and I will try to continue using that that way if we continue Divock. If it grows to more than 30 people though I would also make a team list. This was a bit like we might have already done a team list at push to talk and then the metaped was home to random things and drafts for instance an early stage of call for angel was lingering around as a draft for a couple of weeks in a metaped. This is once again an invitation to work together. I'd argue that it is better writing on one pet than merging things later. Nobody likes merging and then we had the mumble pets. The mumble pets existed early like they existed as soon as the mumble was announced and here you see an imaginary pet before the meeting starts. We already had the meeting date of mumble linked to metaped and list of mumble attendees and before we would collect topics who wanted to discuss something were invited to write it into the agenda. This is good for two things on first of all it supports single tasking which makes happy and productive and the other thing does is that when in the beginning of the meeting there's already agreement what is going to be discussed the meeting is much smoother. In fact we didn't need official moderators in some sense the pets were the moderators. As soon as the need for a pet came to awareness the pet was created and linked to in a metaped. This was also true for feedback pets and doing this in my opinion is important to keep everybody's mental load at a bearable level by promoting single tasking especially at stressful times. The idea for the Q&A pet came up at hint service where we tried to get a low-tech way of audience participation. The signal angel cared for the visual order in the pet and the herald read the questions directly from the pet and in a very rare case of bad behavior on the pet the single age signal angel would change the writing permission on the pet to team only and add questions from matrix and twitter and this was somehow there was chaos organizing itself magically on the Q&A pets people wrote answers themselves and people wrote down the answers for the speaker so this was something that we were surprised of. Yes and now to STB for the technical details you are muted STB you have to unmute well somebody muted me but apparently I have to unmute myself so now we should be able to hear me and see me so before I get into the technical details let me just add one thing that was a rather major point for me that like which made it absolutely enjoyable to be part of the organizational team and that was that we very quickly gathered people who thought oh maybe I can contribute something and they appeared for the first time in one of the mumbles and said would you mind if I did this or that and he said by all means go ahead that's a fantastic idea just do it and that that was absolutely fantastic it created a very nice atmosphere working together and I think many of the things that work really well got to us not by some central person saying hey let's do this somebody has to do this we need to find somebody who can do this or that for us but really people popping up and saying is anybody doing X yet and the answer usually was no nobody is doing that yet but it's a fantastic idea do you want to do it and they did so that was really that that made it super cool to be part of it all right into the technical details I'm going to talk a little bit about the live video production and how we did that how the workshops and self-organized sessions work a little bit how we managed some communication and community interaction and finally some thoughts about free software and open source okay so the live video production the Vock somehow was preparing OBS studio as a remote controlled video switching and direction thing and they were playing around with that and when Easter Egg had to be canceled somebody from the Vox said do you want to do a virtual event and some of us said yeah why not like we have all this content and if you know how to do like a remote thing we'll be happy to work on that and that's how that got started and at that time OBS was the only thing we really had available so we had a central OBS that put together the speakers and the heralds and everybody else who would appear on camera and the speakers and heralds were using OBS on their own machines to produce their image and mix in the slides and all that for some things we used Jitsie or BBB especially if we have multiple speakers and that simply worked through kind of filming the browser window like we're doing right now the second when people are using OBS to produce their own video signal there's a lot of latency involved so typically the minimum latency that you can achieve with OBS is about five seconds and of course if you have an interaction between a herald or two speakers five seconds is way too long that creates very awkward pauses or if the latency is different between the different speakers then people start talking over each other and that doesn't work at all so we thought okay we have a tool that enables low latency audio interaction and that is mumble so all of the participants were together in a mumble and were talking through mumble with each other and then the video and the audio for the stream was picked up by OBS and we synchronized the OBS so they would all have the same amount of latency roughly at least by basically adjusting the streaming parameters that the OBS is using and that worked relatively well not perfect but it definitely worked so of course we had the power of the box behind this event or these events so the box was providing the cdn and the transcoding for that and so that worked really well we also wanted to have live translation in there and that is something that this year we couldn't do in the dbox that simply until last year i thought that computer audio was a solve problem and i learned this year it's not it's horrible basically irrespective of which operating system you use and it's super hard to pick up and mix together audio solstices in just the right way to embed them into a final video streams with multiple audio tracks that's that's a really hard problem that we don't have a good solution for but except for with professional equipment but not and on basically home computers with open source software but work is ongoing on that but we could make the interpreters heard through mumble directly so we communicated simply the mumble server that the interpreters were speaking into while listening to the live stream and people could pick up the interpreted audio from there and the fact that we couldn't get the translated audio directly into the stream is also the reason most of the talks from the dbox are not online yet on media ccd because somebody still needs to sit down and do the final audio mixing and i'm hoping to help do that in the next couple of weeks and yet another use of pads and cody md cody md includes a feature where you can write mark down slides and through reveal j.s a javascript library you can produce slides the slides you're looking at right now are produced exactly this way and you can enable autoplay and so that was our info beamer so again we just filmed the browser window in which this pad was running and that was how we got the typical info beamer style slides onto the stream and again questions and feedbacks via the pads but ben i mean already mentioned that one thing that is more organizational than necessarily technical is you need to spend a lot of time preparing the speakers of course at the end of this year this is much has become much easier but at the beginning of the year virtually nobody had any idea how to produce good video and audio from home very few people have done that before maybe some gamers did because they're on twitch all the time i have no idea but most people had no idea how bad they really sounded or looked on video because of the lighting not necessarily even because of the technological limitations of their systems but really because the lighting was bad and they were trying to use the microphone that was built into their laptop so getting headsets to everybody or in similar setups was really important and of course we had to rehearse all this like how does this work like who is going to say what when when is the speaker going to start speaking and when does the herald come in and all that so depending on the like computer savviness of the speakers that could take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours and we had a couple of complicated setups where we even spent more than two hours in multiple sessions to get people prepared and for the most part that worked well but we had especially at push to talk we had one thing as our opening on a Friday night where multiple people from all around the world were trying to join a big blue button and we had no time to rehearse that before so the technical quality unfortunately was not so great which is unfortunate because it was a very interesting topic and maybe we find time to do something like that again with better quality if you want to do something like this yourself you don't need too many people but the recommendation would be you need somebody doing the actual video live video editing a video director you need somebody who is the sole person to contact the single point of contact so if there's a question where's the speaker or the speaker wants to know which which jitsie to join or what other URL to open you need this one person that can answer all these questions maybe not answer them themselves but knows how who to talk to to get good answers it's really useful to have a herald who can moderate things and is available if something goes wrong technically so you don't have to broadcast like a like a thing like where we're going to be back right right real soon now or something so somebody who can come on screen and quickly explain what's happening right now and of course when you're using pads to directly let the audience participate in asking questions at least for some topics it's absolutely necessary to have somebody who is monitoring these pads and like make sure no vandalism happens or or something worse so that's really useful to have that and some of our heralds really enjoyed having signal angels who sorted and prepared the questions for them so sorted them by topic or indicated which questions were asked multiple times or something like that and helped structure the pad basically so the heralds can simply pick out the questions one by one without having to read through a long conversation on irc themselves for example okay on to workshops and the self-organized sessions as beniamine mentioned we basically provided a wiki page where everybody could add their session and people did so we had to do very little to entice people to start doing that and they they even started improving the pad sorry the wiki page themselves and organize it because very quickly we had a lot of entries in these tables and they of of course we could not provide the infrastructure to host the session ourselves but already at the time we had a lot of open instances of jitsi big blue button run by reputable organizations or individuals so we simply provided a little list of free servers that people could use and people pick them and then simply put the link into the wiki page for their event so they started using that quite extensively and we did not have to do much except make sure that the wiki page was not badly formatted or something like that so a couple of times we had to fix a couple of obvious mistakes but we didn't need to edit this and although this page was open to edit to anyone we had no vandalism knock on wood and so as beniamine said to our big surprise the sessions didn't end when the first event ended and we now and then there's more sessions that are announced that way so apart from the community from the self-organized sessions we also provided basically the wiki as a central point for people to find information and find community resources like which like which which pads to use for the questions for the talks or where to chat in matrix or irc or discord or macedon or twitter like which accounts to follow and again that was a community effort we did not run our own matrix server or create anything there especially not discord but people did and they said hey i set this up can you link to it and we said gladly fantastic and there were people who were monitoring those channels and communicating back and forth and answering questions so again the community stepped up and did things and it became a really great event without much central coordination so that was again a very nice thing to happen and finally except for the injection of the translated audio into the stream for the translators everything worked decently well so there's a couple of tools that although their open source are really top notch of course there's small problems everywhere but you can do this without any proprietary tools so in this year we have heard from people oh no you have to use zoom everything else sucks and that's simply not true big blue button and jitsi as video conferencing systems work they work very decently could they work better of course are they lacking features of course but having had to work with some commercial alternatives in my day-to-day job i can tell you the the commercial tools are not necessarily any better they just suck in different ways so i'm very happy to be able to do this with free software and open source and there's no reason to think that that you couldn't do it and one more thing it was very interesting which people came together so we started using big blue button and the big blue button people the developers became aware of it and contacted us and said hey we're doing this kind of hackathon and invited a bunch of people to help improve the feature set of big blue button and so a couple of features that have been introduced in the past six months are kind of the result not the direct result but the kind of interaction with the wider community and some of the things we've been doing and i think that's wrapped wraps it up and i'll hand it over to DJ Spock who will talk about the music program in two of the three events yes hi so in the first um of the three events we had of a divorce music program but i think it was only one or two concerts and when it came to um gulasch programmier nacht was cancelled when i heard about it then i thought um yeah there there must be an other event uh instead of that and then i tried to organize another devog it was way too late for for a content like talks or workshop or something like this so i thought i will make musical content only so we had no talks we had no workshops we had only music and audio art but during the preparation for this event something really great happened and there were people there were just things happening so people were creating self-organized sessions were creating there some kind of talks some kind of workshops so that was not only music on this event we have also a lot of other things going on we streamed non-stop from wednesday afternoon till sunday evening so we had no breaks it was a non-stop live stream like 90 of the content was really live we have some stuff that was pre-recorded but most of the things were live and we have done it in cooperation with radio damstadt and c-radar c-radar is a show is a ccc radio show which i can really recommend it's from chaos damstadt and c-radar and radio damstadt supported us with their infrastructure but i will talk about the technical features later and and we also have some supporters for the content from sphere radio sphere radio is from leipzig this is an online radio also all fm is also an online radio it's from hamburg and they contributed also content to our music and audio art stream and then let's talk about the technology so how was it broadcasted we broadcasted the audio via icecast so that was no videos was only audio and we used icecast for the internet broadcasting the radio damstadt has of course their own infrastructure for broadcasting the stuff over fm and also dab plus so i'm not sure if they already have been an ccc event that was almost completely broadcasted via a um sorry i have i have heard something i guess um so that that was also broadcasted via fm and via db plus um what technology we will we used for the organization for the preparation so c-file was um it's a really really nice tool that we really liked for exchanging data for exchanging files that's also non-centralized an open source tool that's um yeah what why we use it we didn't use any like i don't know we transfer or google drive or stuff like this and if it comes to music we have been using mix a tractor and but but it doesn't mean what you think it's just a shortcut for broadcast using this tool and this is a tool that can stream stuff to an ice cast server and mix and tractor are actually dj software mixed by the way is also an open source free software for mixing and i also can really recommend it at the beginnings like i don't know two or three years ago it was really not a good software um it you could actually not be deejaying with that but right now it's really really great and it can directly stream to an ice cast server and a tractor which actually is a commercial software and and it's like the state of the art software that comes to digital mixing to digital deejaying and i think it's really nice that the only possibility that they have in their program to stream to an audio server is to stream to an open source ice cast so um yeah that's why i'm mentioning this and i also would like to mention that it was a really great thing that i started doing this musical stuff and so much other things happened also without any um interaction from me and almost all of the people also who are right now here in this talk were supporting this this event it was really nice and we also had some music and the push to talk event by actually using the same technology yeah and i could talk hours about this i think that was enough overview thank you very much djsbog beniamine stb for this rundown of the organizational technical uh details and the music stream so let's try to pull this all together and look at how it worked out first content i previously mentioned that the hidden service could rely on recycled submissions from easter hag but by the time it came to push to talk uh we were ready to experiment some more to use the advantages of of this uh remote feature and we had our own cfp asking specifically for remote interactive contents and even though perhaps it didn't turn out perfect technologically um it did allow us to have something like a multi-site transcontinental live transmission um on on broadcast on live stream that's one of the examples another example was that we had an art workshop that uh directly was engaging the remote audience and interacting via um very social media in in real time um also we've we've heard this multiple times but it probably cannot be stressed enough that divock is really uh an event where everyone is an active contributor um people are not just an audience it's a real community event small events but definitely very much community driven so in that sense divock is not for tourists which simply means that it attracts a certain type of crowd that is really eager to contribute themselves um so an amazing level of self-organization has emerged we've heard this before really a lot self-organized sessions happened and kept happening um and various degrees of self-organization of the participants with contributed uh matrix channel squared apads and so on we've we've heard all this um and it's also a format that is particular that turned out to be particularly suitable for communities um that are distributed to start with um one of the examples is the autismus nerd talk with people distributed uh all over um and another traditionally distributed uh network um are the hexing please do ask us more about these examples um in the q and a we have data um also any total evidence here i i do want to mention this um we felt that this kind of event attracted a quite diverse and international crowd and that was also a very welcome side effect so trying to summarize all this um let me say that divocks are community events that can bring together people that can bring together communities that uh can spawn new and improbable friendships and i have to say that personal this is really something that uh has has kept me afloat through this year divots can be a lot of fun to organize and attend uh so at this point in time a very very big thank you to all of you who who made this happen but also um divots are not a substitute it's just not the same as real life events uh and we all know that um and it means that when you're preparing a divock uh to happen uh you have to invest some energy to manage expectations um people's people shouldn't be except uh expecting um the same exactly the same experience that they would have in um physical events um also let's not kid ourselves here um covid is not done with us so we are not done with divock uh and that is well more hidden and darker meaning also of divock forever uh divock is here to stay for for a while so let's look at the details of how of how that can happen what um can we offer what can you offer for the future of divock first of all if you're new to this uh we invite you to catch up on previous divocks uh you will find individual events on the uh previously mentioned wiki pages that are listed here and as always with chaos events you'll find the recorded talks of past events either in the temporary drive or uh properly published in the archive on media cccde with the individual links um to the talks of the events given below secondly uh you can join the community if you haven't already done so uh on the one hand by looking if there are still any self-organized sessions going on that you would like to become part of you can join the community on irk on matrix or connect on social media via mason or twitter and then finally thirdly um if you want to contribute yourself if you want to organize a future divock or adopt divock elements into your own event we have compiled resources on how to divock um again in a dedicated wiki page that you see listed here and you're very welcome to get in touch with us um with the divock team at the email address uh listed here so at this point before we move on to the qna and invite you to an interactive workshop right after this uh stb is going to be give us a sneak preview for 2021 that sounds like uh we have prepared something already um no we haven't really prepared anything yet but um as we all were preparing for this current event the rc3 um we all had hopes that the the whole corona virus situation would would somehow magically be less severe than it turned out to be this winter and at this point it's pretty clear that at least in germany we won't have any live in-person events at least until the summer um so um i speak for the people who are here right now but i think a couple more as well um we really think that over easter we don't want to do something again um whatever the name might be um and i think we'll just continue the tradition of having a divock at easter um or that will be the beginning of the tradition so to speak um so if you're if you don't know what you want to do over easter because you're stuck at home because of restrictions um think about whether you want to join divock help organize it contribute some interesting content organize a cool workshop or whatever strikes your fancy really because it continues to be also an experimental format um we're not really restricted in many ways and we can do pretty much whatever you want so if you have a cool idea that you think might be worth trying please get in touch uh join us and uh then we'll see what we can do in a couple months time so i don't know uh i can so the the final thing really is the q and a we we finished our time slot so there's unfortunately no time for the q and a right now here on the stream but if you go to the link uh that is on the slide right now so an rc world uh if you log on to the rc3.world uh and look search use the search uh function to search for divock there's a divock forever workshop uh which is a big blue button and we'll be joining that big blue button right after this talk in a minute or two and then we look forward to uh answering your questions hear your suggestions or whatever you might want to say to us or come and join us right away so thank you very much to the really interesting insight of divock and uh i think we should all go now to the workshop and ask the questions or uh just um you know help to keep this going on and uh i think it's can be a really interesting alternative for staying alone at home next year absolutely