House of Tea @38C3

While planning ahead the setup of the House of Tea, we attempted to take into consideration the objective of offering some sort of “best effort” in terms of care related to the spread of potential viral infections.

It led to a frustrating process:

• It is hard to formalize and prioritize such a process when a bunch of volunteers are co-creating something ephemeral as the House of Tea…
  • A lot of formal knowledge is actually missing. We tried to ask ourselves about the use of small, portable air filters. But, beyond the fact that nobody seemed to know how to evaluate and/or chose one, someone declared that they were probably useless for such big volumes as the ones of CCH, and that the modern CCH building should indeed have its own air filtration. Nobody could figure out conclusive data on the topic.

As a consequence, our efforts will mostly be comprised of:

• Respecting everyone's choice in regard to wearing a protection mask or not;
• Making some masks available freely at the House of Tea;
• Dishwashing will be one essential part, at the heart of some extra efforts: disposable gloves, process limiting the number of hands in the wash (one or two person doing an entire batch of dishwashing), double soak+wash (liquid soap and sodium bicarbonate)… Everyone can play a part by helping making sure it is done right, that water is changed regularly, etc.;
• Having a CO2 monitor in a central location, that will give us an idea of when to ventilate (Though it seems as contrarily to previous times in previous-CCH on the 4th floor, there is no “emergency exit” or window that we could possibly open from time to time to circulate air!);
• an open-roof design enabling better circulation of air;
• Having a contactless body thermometer in case anyone wants to use one;
• Maybe one small air filter, and one essential oil diffuser.

We are at least trying, and everybody can do their part. But in the end everybody is gambling, with their own risks, in our collective experience…

Let's stay hydrated, rested, gesund, and mindful of each other! <3