House of Tea @38C3

This is by essence subjective and non-exhaustive. Feel free to add your own memories, anecdotes, and/or create an entire page/section for your own stories!

During buildup, all that could happen did happen:

• one pillar on our area wasn't “really a pillar”(!), withdrawing one high-anchor point essential for the foundation of our structure;
• new rigorist interpretation of some new regulation made us tear our 10y old beautiful long piece of fireproof fabric into a bunch of 50cm wide “spaghettis” :( and improvise a “non-roof” with them;
• the airplane of our most experienced architect/decorator got canceled. she arrived 20h later in the afternoon of day1, after buildup.
• no accessible tap of drinkable water was available at our floor in the building (!!!) to fill our jugs;
• we ended up borrowing back and forth *a lot* of missing material, to fit new consatraints, to the LOC (thanks @c3loc!!);
• the tea stock from Camp was nowhere to be found, and never re-appeared;
• …and at 3:00AM on day1 we figured that about 100% of our cushions and blankets were *moldy* (probably from storage), prompting us to source 80 new ones -as much as one car can fit!- that got brought from the shop 12h later (thanks @kangoulya)!

Some finished their part of the buildup at 4, 5AM… and were obviously not here at 10:00 when the first activity had been schduled: “welcome to the House of Tea”… They couldn't witness how this “event” was in fact a hack, to ensure that people would be there in a close-to-ready House of Tea with no introduction or presentation whatsoever! ;) An impressive crowd of participants old and new just appropriated the place as it was set up during the night, and started making tea! Tea was indeed flowing at 10:00, and probably never stopped until day4!

Organisation of all things got a bit “chaotic” (!) with a House of Tea already very crowded, and very little water and not all tea cups even taken out of their boxes and washed! Yet it took less than 10 minutes of “maintainance” to move the 5 tables containing all tea gear, cups, boilers, dish-washing boxes, etc. and move them back, in order to cover the floor they were standing on with disposable carpet, upon request by the building personnel!

Fortunately the disposal of waste water on the “balcony” (through the water evacuation route “abfluß” of the building) and a strong solidarity pact with the Coffee Nerds helped us establish a route for mutualizing the fetching of fresh drinking water from one floor below, using a cart and the elevator (!). The House of Tea got *very* crowded at peak hours.

All the organisation of the tea gear and the wash was re-done in the morning, its order inverted, in order to “protect” the wash against too much good will from people not reading dishwashing instructions, and to counter the physical and architectural patterns making some people wait in line as if tea was to be served (plans needed here for 38C3).

Later on, ALL 15-20 teapots were warm (aka “in use”) at the very same time! What a lovely bottleneck! So much tea flowing! Impossible to quantify how much water was fetched during the day, but it's in the 100s of liters. Many workshops are going on, including Trevor Paglen's CYCLOPS.sh user meetup, “team datenschutz” meetup, and in the evening maybe 100 ppl attending Brett's electronic music composition workshop (overflowing in the general passageways in a way that made security/CERT people -along with some visually impaired visitors- slightly uncomfortable! We tried to remediate by being around…)

A total of 7 workshops and activities happened that day at the House of Tea! including: one concert, water-color painting (thanks @mona!), one “gameboy chat” about intercepting its video bus to stream on it “Never Gonna Give You Up” from a laptop (!), one VJ projection session (thanks @AdeptVeritatis!), and one workshop that wasn't publicized in the schedule, about seriously hacking #$%!! app e-scooters via their CAN-bus…

At that time, two workshops were even happening at the same time, all while tea was flowing in all parts, attendance at its peak!

More workshops and activities (a total of at least 16 during the entire event!), and later in the afternoon a notable notch of chilling down along with participants progressively leaving the site and with some assemblies already starting their tearing down.

Our tear down started at the very last second of the last minute of the last talk (actually a few minutes after that official time of tearing down, even!) By being numerous to just chill and having a good time, we could then finish our last tea cup and all together get up and fold things! Maybe 25 of us, or more? 1h later it was more than 50% done, so quick! so impressive that it went almost too fast to process emotionally! After 2h, all was almost done, and despite some delays the palette could then be assembled during a few more hours (thanks @lamirale, @dshml), to find its new location closer to CCH for next year. \o/

• Such a nice time! Such a nice collection of people, affinity group and collective effort! Some hard work, but was entirely worth it. Really appreciated that there was non notion of a division between “staff” and “non-staff”. Hope nobody felt overworked or burnt out…

• We failed at having House of Tea meeting, where some information (about workshops, points of concerns, new information, etc.) could have been shared.

• We discussed abundantly and failed at creating a “membrane”, drapes that would separate a bit the HoT from the passageway, enabling participants to not see the face of the passersby, and preventing the passersby to just stare at the participants. At least one participant told me she was distressed by looking at the passageway while changing position around the table.

• We need better organisation of the wash, and kindness-based setup/devices to make sure people do not feel forced to wash but on the contrary read instructions (maybe 1/ visual+functional separation of wash from the rest, with wash further “inside” 2/ maybe a sort of device like a curtain, or a box to lift before doing the wash)

• We need more presence for the workshops and activities, at least to warn people around that it will be happening and make a bit of space around, and ideally serve tea. (On one occurence the presenter came by himself and sat as close as one can be to the tea gear and all, his workshop considerably hindering tea-activity for 1h…)

• We need to buy more of the following:
  1. Tea pots
  2. Tea strainers (they were a bottlneck too, thus making people throw leaves directly in the pot, with effect of 1/ preventing control of infusion time and further infusions, wasting leaves 2/ making washing of teapots more complicated)
  3. cushions! more cushions!!! \o/
  4. blankets to replace the moldy/trashed ones…
  5. boilers, we had many little “downtimes” due to them needing like 20 or 30 minutes to heat water. Filling water bottle in prevision for these downtimes is a solution but it requires organization, time and vigilance.
     1. Maybe we should consider a classic 1,5L boiler to help in these cases ?
     2. (or a third “industrial grade” one?)
     3. also the cheap thermometer we got is graded “for humans”, while others that were not and explicitly saying “not for humans” (maybe not as precise, or precise enough in the 36-40 range?) can measure the temperature of boiling water… ours cannot! I saw some people grab ours, convinced it was there for the purpose of measuring the temp. of water… ⇒ maybe a thermometer for the boiling water could help in such cases: last remaining water in a boiler before re-filling it is drawn into a thermo bottle, later on someone wants to check the temp of this water / a boiler is boiling, and one wants to check if the water is already at least 70 or 80 degrees, maybe good enough for some brews? / somebody just passes by and wants to check the temp of the body of a boiler before even drawying water in a thermo or something…?