OK.
So tell us the story of the heck of a process.
All right.
So my name is Mattia.
People often call me cook.
You may have seen the duck before.
And this is a story of a little duck and a hacker train.
So what happened was, first of all,
it's clearly a question, what is a hacker train?
Hacker train, as well, a train full of hackers
and in our case, a duck.
So we have a sticker.
We have a domain name now since January.
It's always a good start for a geeky project.
But here's the origin of the story.
It's like, and for several years, we've
been thinking of just around 10,000 geeks at Faustown.
Most of them are from Europe.
Europe has mostly decent railways.
Why don't we do something with this?
So we had like early goals, like, OK, like for short-term goals,
like, let's make the first thing, let's make the thing fun.
So we want to make sure that hackers meet on a train
because in such a big place that as Faustown
is, you will bump into a lot of people.
But if you don't know them, maybe you won't
start a conversation, but if you're stuck on a train together
for, you know, some hours, you might get to learn each other.
And also, it's a ecological and comfortable way
to travel, and we're comfortable ish,
depending on your preferences.
So the long-term goal was also, well, let's
make it more affordable and more convenient for people
to actually go on a train.
As we've probably heard throughout the day,
so I won't be drawn on about that.
All right, so what's the plan?
So clearly, there was a plan A.
You can assume that plan A was not what happened,
but we have plan A in a draw, and I hope
it's going to happen at some point.
So the idea was, why don't we just charter a whole freaking
train with hackers on it, and just figure out
the route, how we want to get to foster them,
and pick up all these hackers along the way,
and we're going to have, you know, we're going to have a carriage
for hardware hacking, we're going to have a carriage
for networking, and we're going to have a carriage
for dropping that and sleeping.
So that was the big plan.
So yeah, we went.
So there were guys like this guy here,
and a few others in our hackerspace, who
when I presented that last year at Fazem,
I said, you know, completely pine this guy idea,
and they went online, and like five minutes later,
we're like, you actually can.
You're like, okay, let's explore this.
And I have to say, I was not the oldest one in the room.
So I wasn't this side.
There were people who were older than me,
and more experienced on that side,
and was like, please, somebody be the adult in the room.
And the adults in the room were like,
that's a chakul idea.
So, right, so I get into our contact with Slovenian school.
Listen, it's a, they said, oh, that's really funny,
because we know exactly how much it costs
to create a custom line from Ljubljana to Brussels and back,
because somebody was trying to do that a few months ago.
Well, the odds was not about Fazem.
So I know how much it costs, specifically,
I have it to the Euro exact, but it's roughly 96K Euros.
And you got a custom line, and the train stays here,
and then you get the custom route back home.
But it only has seats, it has no electricity on board,
and you have to have, you know,
there's like 200 odd seats that you have to fill.
Which we calculated, like really short,
is like, yeah, that's a bit expensive.
So, no.
Plan B.
The standard obvious solution.
Let's take Slovenian school, Ljubljana to the baby,
maybe Deutsche Mann, and had a question, okay.
And then, just maybe just reserve a carriage.
So, yeah, that's sensible.
So, we started discussing that,
and then there was the chicken and egg problem.
So, which route do we take,
and how many people will be on it,
and you don't know which route you will take,
and how many people will be on it before you know,
which people want to be on it,
and you don't know which people to spam with,
before you know, which route you want to take.
So, while we were chicken and egging,
and also, you know, the reservation
might probably cost us some money.
So, while we were chicken and egging,
somebody from Mitella, which is a hacker space,
and Triasta, said, you know, there's this new company,
that they set up, they're setting up a direct night
friend from Venice to Brussels, and they were like,
oh, yeah, that is so convenient.
So, I rented them up, I sent them an email.
Kudos to the lady, that she actually answered back,
because I was stupid enough to start the email with,
I'm organizing a hacker train.
And I was back then, where the Polish hackers with the train
were still a flesh memory.
So, after I convinced you to actually go on a voice call
with me, we established like, and like the first five minutes
that no, we're not going to the train.
They were very helpful, and it turns out
that we can't take, this late pause this year,
the Venice route, because the Venice route establishes
in three days for the first time,
which is a bit late for pause them, at least this year.
So, but she said, well, but we have,
like, a really nice night train from Prague to Brussels,
and I can look down a Prague,
I said, it's super simple.
We'll just give you a custom booking link,
and you just send the link to whoever,
and once, you know, one or two days before the train leaves,
we'll just squish everybody who used that booking link
into the same part of the train,
so you guys can be together.
Look, okay, that's convenient,
and it's just that I would just give you 10% discount,
because that's a cool idea, like, okay.
So, that's what we did.
How did it actually go?
Numbers are weird, so I spend quite a bit of time spamming
in all sorts of places, including every hacker's place
on hackerspaces.org in the 50 kilometer radius
on the Prague Brussels line.
FSFE was great to include us in their newsletter.
We were featured as one of the Faust and Pringe events,
et cetera, et cetera, which resulted in,
just before the train left,
it was like 2.6,000 unique visitors to the post,
but which described what we are doing.
In turn, resulted in 40 clicks on the actual booking link.
So, European sleeper still does that,
it resulted in 16 to 20 bookings, total,
and, you know, on Monday,
or what it used to, it used on New Tuesday,
they were like, seven people on the actual train.
So, what I suspect is, the way we was set it up
was that you could use the booking link in either direction
and there was like a two weeks before and after window.
So, I'm pretty sure like some people used it to go
like two days before, two days after we went,
which is fine.
So, you know, there was also like,
then asked ourselves, I mean, there's a big difference
between this and this.
I mean, this clearly anecdotal evidence,
but we asked a few of the people who we know,
said no, and there's, you know,
classical answer to expansive two-time consuming.
In Slovenia specifically,
forst them is in the middle of exams season.
So, Yuri is the only one who came
because he managed to organize it, for him,
but most of the other students couldn't.
And what surprised me was that when,
because I was spamming all these hacker spaces,
quite a few answers I got was the hacker spaces,
just don't go to foster them,
which surprised me to be honest.
I mean, this might need further investigation.
But not for me, that's some other question.
So, we heard earlier today, also that, yes, you know,
it's more convenient, it's faster, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera, to go with other ways.
And this year we made a comparison
because some of us, the seven of us,
went with the option A, so plan C, that we did.
And a different colleague, when the standard route,
like, went through with Ebib,
and Yuri, because of time constraints,
because of exams, had to take the train.
And so this is like a typical way how you would go
if you're in a hurry, and on a budget,
from Lublana to Brussels.
And the other two are just like option A
and option B when it comes to a night train.
I don't think that's a huge difference,
especially if you count just that day-time travel,
instead of the whole travel.
So that was interesting, but yeah,
so how did train actually go?
And this is where the duck comes in.
So this is a picture from the train station in Prague
about an hour before we left,
where me and Leon back then,
they were sitting at the cafe and with together with the duck.
And we were like, is anybody actually going to show up?
Just nobody told us they're going to show the only one
we heard about showing up was a lady from Tennessee,
who said she's going to go.
And then she emailed us the day before that her plane
is late, and she's not going to be able to go with us.
And we're like, it's just me, you went the duck, mate.
But people did show up.
So this had ultimately the way we were seven.
So this was the train, the second from the bottom.
This is how the train looked like.
It was a bit old, but inside it was okay.
And yeah, so we were like, the duck was there
to show people where the official meeting place is.
This was the most comfortable way we could find
to get the poor duckie.
But it hit at his job.
So this is where we were actually meeting
until what, like, one, 30 in the evening,
and then we went to sleep.
So yeah, that's the crew.
That's the crew from another angle.
It's still the same people.
So we're only seven and a duck.
We did have an unconference on it.
So we discussed quite a lot of things, as I said.
We were up until very late in the evening,
and then honestly, like next day, when we went off the train,
we still hung out together for quite some time,
and we created the chat room group,
and we ordinated to show each other, where to go,
what to see each other.
It was great.
So yeah, I mean, there are some lessons to be learned, of course,
for organizers, which in this case was me.
We figured out that instant the chat groups
and direct nails to other organizers are much more efficient
than sending things to official mailing lists.
So a mailing list of a hacker space
was basically a black hole.
I don't think we, at least from what we could tell,
we didn't get any reply from any of the mailing lists
with an mailing list to mail to.
I short about, would have been really nice,
especially for me, and loud and back there.
And yeah, although as I showed, it's not much more expensive.
It would still be really nice if we could subsidize
the trip for those who have a harder time paying something
for that, so sponsors would be nice.
King Finne, and something that we also noticed
was that there were several people who, you know,
we went pretty early because of the fringe events.
And I'll be honest, I mean, I had some fringe events
I had to be on, so I just said, well,
let me know, although we did have a vote.
We did have a public vote on when we're going.
It just happened to my choice one.
But yeah, it would be, so I know that some people
and a few days after, on the same route,
and I know that some people wanted to go,
but there would have been on a different route.
So if we had more resources, like more people
volunteer in, et cetera, we could maybe do different spokes
or different times, and I would have been cool.
And if anybody wants to do the same thing for CCC
or some other conference, very happy to share one another.
But I'm not going to do it.
And yeah, some suggestions, also, for, you know,
railway companies, et cetera, et cetera,
is an important part here.
I'm not going to draw on about booking,
making booking easier.
There's several things about making booking easier
would have helped us.
And the European Planner project, if I knew about that,
we might have done things differently.
But just as an anecdote, it took me, last time,
to convince the scared lady on over voice over IP,
from, no, we're not hacking your train.
To, oh, great, here's a booking link.
Everything is sorted.
Then it took me to go to the kind lady behind the landscape.
She lives in the counter and got my own ticket,
just want ticket from Lubliana to Prague, to be on time.
And even then, and then we got into the laser
a pain and December schedule changes a pain.
As if those two things didn't happen, me and I, me and Leon,
wouldn't have to stay overnight in Prague.
We could have done that in a one day trip,
instead of staying in Prague for an X-ray, which was nice
because we visited some hackerspaces in Prague, but still.
And that's it.
So, you know, what about the future?
Honestly, it depends on you.
It was, I was spent, I'm spent.
But it was fun enough.
So, we're doing an interest check for next year.
And it's a bit more structured, surveys, a very short,
but more structured surveys.
So, we can know how many people want to go
and where they would like to start.
And when they would like to go,
and then we'll see what's the interest.
And then hopefully we can use some better tooling already
to find a route, that's basically it for me.
I'll leave this QR open so people can scan it.
QR question.
I think that the day is amazing since I've been arriving in Ross
and for me, I'll leave it by train,
I don't know, like a pain.
Let's have a change.
And my question is, we did the same for the line.
We talked about Dr. Sino-Kamit, but I don't have it.
So, come again, I didn't, I just didn't hear the last two, three words.
We'll do this same initiative for upstream
to do what I can see here.
Can't do why it can't happen.
How far or more I can, so they're following now,
about what it is that I can't do.
We come to the problem again.
I have a full-time job.
I'm helping run a hacker space.
I do all sorts of other stuff.
I wouldn't.
I would very gladly help whoever wants to do that.
As I said, we have a domain now.
We don't do anything with the domain other
than rerouting to my next cloud to do this.
But if anybody volunteers to do that, I'm happy to share what
I know, and I'm happy to help, however I can.
But I don't think I'll be going on why,
because of time constraints.
But yeah, if you tag yourself, mention
that you would like to have this and just check the boxes
which you would like, or could help with.
If you know, there's also some checkboxes,
what you could help with if you want to.
So the question was, would we do this for why it can't.
My questions could make sense
at some kind of virtual act of way,
because you will always have to solve them
because everyone is going from everywhere.
But in our case, it would have been nice
to play with Mita on the way from Colom to Brussels.
So that we have just one part together
where Mita people who have quite like here
on the same thing with you too.
So how can I summarize this question?
So the question was, would it make sense
to do it more of a virtual way, to just
and we kind of did that.
So there was in the forum thread where we discussed
where we discussed the situation.
We also said that you can use the prevailing app.
And you can check the there that you want you traveling
that you're traveling to Phosdom,
and that people who are not on the official hacker train
to Phosdom can coordinate that way,
or use the forum to coordinate,
so say, well, we're on that route, let's get together.
So that would make sense, yeah.
We tried that.
I don't know how many people did it.
I know that there's a group of people who are
when two days after us,
but they were a group of people already before.
So I'm sorry, we are at a lot of time
they need to clean up the room and thank you.
Thank you.