BalCCon has been organized by the community and appreciates all kinds of participation. You were encouraged to contribute to this event by volunteering.

The Congress would not be possible without many people donating their time bringing the Congress to life and dealing with all the side effects of bringing hundreds of hackers together in a congress centre.

The congress heavily relies on your help! Please consider volunteering at BalCCon 2k13.

You can sign up by submitting a email at jelena at balccon.org
Email subject should be:Volunteer BalCCon 2k13

Email Body:
Personal Information:
Volunteer Name (nickname):
Country:
Email ID:
Contact Number:
Volunteer Profile: (max 1000 words)

if you would like to help us on site.

A big thank you for applying for volunteering at BalCCon 2k13.

Call for Papers for 1st Balkan Computer Congress – BalCCon
06|07 September 2013, Novi Sad, Vojvodina, Serbia, Europe, Earth, Milky Way

The Event:
Balkan Computer Congress has been conceptualized as a two day gathering of the international hacker community in the organization of LUGoNS – Linux users of Novi Sad. The first part of the program has been envisaged to be a set of presentations, workshops and lectures on the current topics regarding privacy, technology, software development, free software & socio-political issues. Hands-on projects and hacking have been planned for the second part of the program. We admire and tend to find a role model in the large scale conferences such as Chaos Communication Congress, organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC).

Smaller hacker community gatherings had been organized in the Balkans in the past, yet, this is the first International Congress of this scale.

Organizers:
Organization team has scores of years of experience visiting, participating in and volunteering at hacker events of all sizes. This is our first attempt to organize such an event independently, with the help of friends from all around the world!

The Location:
Novi Sad is the centre of Vojvodina, northern province of Serbia, famous for its multicultural history and active artistic and technological scene (e.g. music festival Exit and digital-media event Share). With a prestige night life combined with the warm and welcoming character, Novi Sad offers inexpensive prices for lodging and dining, compared to the neighboring EU.

Our Goal:
Our goal is to gather all the communities from the region, continent and the World in an effort to hack, play, learn, pass knowledge and exchange experience. BalCCon aims to become the central hacker community in South East Balkan, as well as to provide the opportunity for all the people in this part of Europe to connect and to cooperate.

Having said that, we would like to invite you to make and send us proposals for talks, lectures and workshops on all topics of relevance. We would also like to see installations and projects you have done recently. The following areas are of particular interest:

• Free Software
• Interesting Hardware
• Security Nightmares
• Deep Web
• Cryptography, Cryptanalysis and Crypto-politics
• Social Networks – unexpected use, abuse and analysis
• Social Engineering
• Robotics – humanoid, football playing, autonomous vehicles, (armed) drones, ethics, utopia and dystopia
• Hacker Space Program, Space Travel and Satellites – technology, goals and ethics
• Reverse Engineering, Forensics and Anti-Forensics – technology, law and politics
• Mobile Device Hacking and Telecommunications Security, Security of Apps
• Clouds – hacking, breaking, unexpected usage
• Future or No Future of IT Security – state of fail, new concepts and methods, implications for society and infrastructure
• Lockpicking
• DPI (deep packet inspection) – current state of introduction, breaking, circumvention and political situation
• Net and Device Neutrality – ownership, censorship, circumvention and the politics of de-facto standards, search engine politics
• Programming Languages — state of the art and research
• Politics and Technology of Surveillance and Oppression – state trojans, interception, social media monitoring, laws and counter-movements
• Revolutions and Hacktivism
• Transparency and Participation in Politics and Governance
• Copyright and Patents – the war on file-sharing, alternatives to the current system

Submission Guidelines

For Talks, Lectures and Workshops:
Please submit a meaningful and complete description which will give us an insight on the key points of your presentation. We prefer quality over quantity, which will be evaluated based on the proposal you send us. Also, have in mind that other people might submit a talk on the same topic, so give us a reason to consider your presentation unique. Feel free to include some facts about yourself and the things that motivate you. It is not necessary for your talk to be the first of its kind, it may have been presented at other conferences, however please make sure that its content is up to date.
Lectures should not exceed 45 minutes, plus up to 15 minutes for questions and answers. Longer time slots are possible if we feel the topic demands it (please tell us if necessary). Please indicate the length of your presentation clearly on your submission.

Language of the Presentation:
BalCCon is an international congress, therefore your submissions should be in English. It is expected that we will have participants from all over the World, so it is important to have a common language.

Travel Expenses:
The Balkan Computer Congress is a non-profit oriented event and speakers are not paid. However, financial help on accommodation may be possible, within our means, for all accepted submissions. Don’t be shy and state your requirements in the application when submitting your proposal.

How to Submit?
Please follow the instructions below. If you have any questions regarding your submission, feel free to contact us at cfp@balccon.org.

By Email:
Email your submission to: cfp@balccon.org.
Email subject should be: CFP BalCCon 2013 – Paper Title
Email Body:
Personal Information:
Speaker Name:
Job Role/Handle:
Company/Organization:
Country:
Email ID:
Contact Number:
Speaker Profile: (max 1000 words)
Presentation Details:
Name/Title of the Presentation:
Paper Abstract: (max 3000 words)
Presentation Time Required (20, 30, 50 Minutes)
Is there any demonstration? Yes or No

Other Needs & Requirements:
Do you need any special equipment?
If you have any other requirements, please mention it here and the reason.

All submissions will be reviewed by our Program Committee. Authors will be notified upon acceptance of their talk.

Dates and Deadlines:

• July 1st, 2013 (23:59 UTC): Submission deadline
• July 15th, 2013: Final notification of acceptance
• September 6th – 7th, 2013: BalCCon Computer Congress

All submissions will be judged equally, disregarding race and gender. Organizers reserve the right to make changes to the event program or disregard any proposal if found inappropriate for this congress.

What is BarCamp?

BarCamp (oft uncoference) is gathering of users with public workshops and lectures, their content and progress were developed by participants at the beginning of the meeting and are developed at futher progress. BarCamp used to share ideas, to discuss, for learning and develop and the product of that work can already be seen in part at the end of the event with demonstrating concrete results (eg joint workshop program).

History

BarCamp name is an allusion to a series of events organized by Tim O’Reily, who called FooCamp. Selected individuals (friends of O’Reilly) would meet for mutal exchange of experience, and would stay and spend the night (camping). Participants in FooCamp could only come at the invitation of the O’Reilly’s. At BarCamp is coming without an invitation, and everyone can participate.

The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto (CA) of 19-21. August 2005 in the premises of the company Socialtex and was organized in less then a week, from concept to the event. On it was attended by about 200 people. After that’s BarCamp are organized over 350 cities around the world, North America, South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Australia and Asia.

To mark the first anniversary of BarCamp, a BarCampEarth held simultaneosly at several locations in the world from 25-27. August 2006. Marking the second anniversary, BarCampBlock was held in Palo Alto at the original location within a radius of more than three blocks of 18-19. August 2007, and it was attended by over 800 people.

The largest recorded BarCamp took place in February 2011 with over 4700 registered participants in Yangon, the Myanmar (Burma). Previous year (January 2010) BarCamp Yangon attracted over 2700 participants (registered participants).

LUGoNS BarCamp

LUGoNS first BarCamp will be held on Saturday o1. December in Novi Sad at Aurora hotel starting from 12.00 last until about 20.00 hours. The sole aim of this first meeting is to awaken a sleeping community and return to the dynamics of events in Novi Sad. All communities in the region are more than welcome. We hope that we will be in large numbers.

On this occasion, once more, we invite you to magnify our set with your presence, so we can socialize, share knowledge, make new friends and expand ours horizons.

Currently logged-themes are:
– Tecniques of attack on web services
– Develop and test (gerrit and jenkins)
– Orchestration server (puppet)
– Getting started with microcontrollers (Arduino)
– Retrocomputing
– Hack your all politics
– BalCCon, LUGoNS, Hackerspace
– TOOLX – GNU/Linux
– Workshop: Learn to crimp (the crimpting process by which the end of the line or network cable installed special connectors).
– Discussion: How to animate people to participate more actively in the community and communicate more with each other?

Do not hesitate and feel free to contact us if you have the desire and the need to actively participate in BarCamp-in, and to annouce your topic. All you have to do is send an email to office@lugons.org

Admission is free!

Date:
Saturday, 01 December 2012. year from 12.00 – 20.00h

Location:

Hotel Aurora
Belgrade quay 49b
21000 Novi Sad
Web: www.hotelaurora.rs

Affordable and cheap accommodation options:

Hostel Sova
Hostel Downtown
Hostel Podbara
Smile Hostel

Eeasterhegg 2012
Where: Basel, Switzerland
When: April 06. –  09. 2012

The first international presentation BalCCon projects was held at the Easterhegg 2012 congress in Basel, Switzerland. milobit and zxy were the speakers for lighting talk which lasted 10 minutes. Spoken language: German.

During the presentation few points were taken:

• BalCCon is a first Balcan hackers congress. Although there is a huge number of people interested in that activity, there is no similar manifestation in our region.
• As a grown-up community, we are willing to organize this kind of event, to all the people who have no financial support to visit American or European congresses.
• We see it as a great opportunity to meat people with similar interests, to share knowledge and experience and all of that at our neighborhood.
• Our goal is to gather and link as many communities as possible to make solid base for further projects.
• Congress is planned for September 2013.  Location: Novi Sad, official language: English.
•      We are planning a huge international gathering of communities and free lensers with a lot of opportunities for hacking, gaming, learning, networking and of course partying.
•     Our speakers are very satisfied with the response and interest in people for a BalCCon presentation. They have met a lot of new people and made a many contacts. Everybody really liked our idea, and they are all willing to support it.

The first international BalCCon presentation.

BalCCon – Balkan Computer Congress – warmup part one

Where: CK13, LUGoNS Lab, Novi Sad
When: March 23- 24 2012.

On Friday 23rd March was held an informal gathering of all interested in BalCCon project was held. It was opportunity to meet members of many Serbian GNU/Linux communities, and to exchange information about events and news.

On Saturday 24th March was held a meeting about BalCCon Congress at the LUGoNS central office, from 2:00 p.m. LUGoNS, Slackware Serbia, Linux Mint Serbia, Ubuntu Serbia, CK13 (partner organization) and numerous guests from abroad were attending.

On this meeting we have successfully defined our further steps and a plan of actions.

Official BalCCon website will be available soon. There will be the registration form where all interested in taking a part will be able to participate and to contribute with their skills and abilities.

Official BalCCon Blog is a place where you can  find all information about BalCCon Congress preparations and promotion.

We have developed a detailed plan for better promotion of BalCCon Congress.

Follow us, and you`ll be informed about all news and actions. If you have any suggestions, ideas or critic please feel free to contact us, any feedback is appreciated.