Spring and Summer Events Season 2022

With the successful SEE 10 hybrid meeting having taken place last week, we now look forward to dozens more, this spring and summer. RIPE NCC maintains a calendar, where you can find all these and many more, or you can submit your own event. Here are different views of the events coming up along with some info on why I find them particularly interesting, useful and relevant.

Topics covered:

• Workshops co-organised by RIPE NCC
• Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (JEDI) Criteria Illustrated
• Invitation to All
• Long List of Links

Being a guest - RIPE NCC co-organised workshops

These two featured workshops are co-organised by my colleagues, Jelena Cosic and Emile Aben, as part of other, larger events; SIGCOMM and RightsCon. Our goals are to cross-connect network operators with other diverse communities, and to contribute to RIPE NCC strategy:

• "Tracing the stars in the Internet blackout: measuring network disruption with RIPE Atlas"
  While we haven't got a fixed date for this event yet, it will take place online, for one hour, free of charge, as part of RightsCon (June, 6-10). We are looking for diverse participants - journalists, data visualisers, researchers, software developers, refugees - to talk about measuring network disruption using RIPE Atlas. You have to register for RightsCon in order to take part.

• “Technologies, Applications, and Uses of a Responsible Internet” and “Building Greener Internet”
  This is a joint workshop that will take place as part of ACM SIGCOMM in August. The goals are to examine best solutions for tackling issues around the control of digital services, and how to take part in “building a greener Internet”. We are specifically inviting non-academic contributions from practitioners, artists, policy-makers, activists, hackers. The deadline to submit a letter of interest is 29 April. If you're interested, send this to chrbecker01@protonmail.com.

Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (JEDI)

While organisers aim to make their events accessible, open, and useful, they also have limited time, space, capacities, resources... and have to make decisions that can end up limiting participation, giving preference to some rather and not others.

Some address this issue explicitly and with awareness; others rely on "tradition". In the figure below, I have attempted to rate some of the events based on (my interpretation of) JEDI criteria:

Inclusion: free/online, or: student discount available;

Diversity: attractive to several types of participants; have a Code of Conduct (CoC);

Equity: selects talks and participants based on explicit ethics;

Justice: fights for political goals and works on solving systemic problems

Invitation to all

Organising events is hard work. As organisers, we are looking for a balance between focus and openness, structure and flexibility... but mostly we stay within the limits of our own community. For that reason, we sometimes we fail to attract right people, or to contribute to those who would benefit the most from the content of our events.

As a Community Builder, I belong to multiple distinct communities, where I see the overlap of participants and interests, and also the gaps -- opportunities for connections and contributions, if only people would be aware of what is going on in the adjacent, but different, area of activity / conference / group.

This is why I am trying to promote such a wide mix of events. I want to share this invitation with ALL the communities listed in the article, and inform ALL about the others who have partially overlapping areas of interest, participants and topics.

My passion is for mixing people of various backgrounds and experiences, because I believe that we can always be activated in one of our roles, and take part in one of these activities:

• Learning
• Volunteering
• Teaching 
• Organising
• Caring / healing
• Hacking 
• Facilitating
• Documenting
• Networking (with people)
• Business
• Regulating (laws/politics)

... as a person belonging to one -- or more -- of these "groups":

• Refugees
• Academics 
• Developers
• Operators 
• Lawyers
• Journalists
• Students
• Artists
• Hackers
• Activists
• Researchers

This is what I tried to illustrate by placing all the roles and all the activities in the grid, below.

Calls to action

Applying to take part! Join us! And help spread the word!

Links (in chronological order)

• T.M.R.A. (28 April, then monthly)
  Amsterdam, NL
  The Tactical Media Room Amsterdam (TMRA) is an informal collective of the organisations in Amsterdam/Holland, working on: “how can tech community work together with journalists & non-techies in conflict areas”, during (and after) the war between Russia and Ukraine

• NLUUG Spring Conference 2022 (10 May)
  Utrecht, NL
  NLUUG conferences are events specifically aimed at expert system and network administrators. All sorts of new developments are presented by a variety of speakers.

• GÉANT 16th SIG-NOC (10-11 May)
  Cambridge, UK
  An open forum where experts from its community exchange information, knowledge, ideas and best practices relevant to the networking community.

• RIPE 84 (16-20 May)
  Berlin, DE
  Five-day event where network operators and other technical community experts from all over the world gather.

• RightsCon (6-10 June)
  Online
  RightsCon is the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age.

• Re:publica (8-10 June)
  Berlin, DE
  The festival for the digital society is back this summer.

• TNC 22 (13-17 June)
  Trieste, IT
  Terena Networking Conference - important research and education networking conference.

• AMRO22 DEBUG (15-18 June)
  Linz, AT
  AMRO (Art Meets Radical Openness) is a biennial festival for art, hacktivism and open cultures.

• MCH2022 (22-26 July)
  Zeewolde, NL
  May Contain Hackers is an outdoor hacker camp organised for and by volunteers from the worldwide hacker community.

• TransHackFeminist (THF) Convergence 2022 (1-8 August)
  Catalonia, ES
  A call to all those who build Feminist Infrastructure: a self-organised, face-to-face, body-to-body meeting.

• ACM SIGCOMM (22-26 August)
  Amsterdam, NL
  ACM SIGCOMM is the flagship annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM).