BarCamp 2024 Graz

Yesterday, I visited barcamp Graz 2024.

As with every BarCamp, there is no upfront schedule with talks. Instead, every attendee is able to write down session proposals on paper, go on stage and present this idea in a couple of seconds. After that, there is a public vote for that topic and if enough hands are up, the session is then put on the schedule.

Experiencing a rather long queue of topics, I assumes that there will be a cut-off threshold where sessions do not make it onto the schedule. So I wrote down three session ideas.

However, this year, the organizers managed to offer ten parallel sessions in five time slots. In total, there was room for fifty sessions. So, any session got accepted including my three topics.

The initial session board consisted of scanned-in proposals in a large table. That was not legible at all:

Since this was a Miro board and I could not access that from my phone, I was pleased that the organizers switched to a much better version that contained the titles only:

As it turned out, I started with all of my sessions next to each other.

I may be some sort of a small news junkie. When I turn on my mobile in the morning, the ZIB2 of the previous evening is already waiting on my mobile phone. It's one of the most important news programs in Austria. I watched it every day during my lunch or when waiting for the bus or similar situations. (Saturdays, there is no ZIB2. So I watched ZIB1 instead.)

I also visit news.ORF.at from time to time throughout the day but not that intensive and on some days not even once.

On weekends, I read FALTER which is a "broadly left-liberal" weekly news magazine "on politics, media, culture and the life in Vienna".

Furthermore, I get news via my Mastodon account.

After talking about my news habits, there was a lively discussion among the participants. I learned a lot about media consumption strategies of others, including a very engaged news journalist from Kleine Zeitung who talked about "the other side" and difficulties that journalists face.

As a direct result, I decided to stop watching ZIB2. For the moment, I stick to my other news sources. This should reduce my exposure to news and maybe this results in a better subjective mood.

I might as well write a blog article on my personal list of tips for that topic:

• Avoid algorithms
  • (Secret) algorithms of X, Meta, … do manipulate you without being open about it. They omit certain messages and they push certain messages. Not for your benefit but for maximizing the time spent on their services in order to maximize profit. They're not healthy for you.
• Read different news sources
  • Check your sources
  • Try things outside of your bubble
    • You're creating a bubble, trust me. And from time to time, you really should read stuff that is clearly outside of your bubble.
• Curate your bubble
  • Use RSS/Atom for that!
    • I'm currently using NewsBlur but any other aggregator might be better than no feed aggregator.
• Pay for good stuff
  • Even if it is just one Euro each month of a one-time thing: appreciate good content by spending a few bucks for it now and then.

I've got a felling that the BarCamp crowd is a target group for tagging. Therefore, I handed in a session that is based on my popular blog article How to use Tags.

With probably a docent people, I had the pleasure of going through my set of eight tagging rules.

During this session, I got the idea of two more rules I added today.

You might want to check them out as well.

I met Heinz at the BarCamp. Since we're both related to graz.social - Association for the Promotion of Ethical Digital Culture, I proposed a joined session on the Fediverse in general and Mastodon in particular.

With probably ten people, we've introduced the idea of decentralization, federation and explained things related to Mastodon. At least a few will start using Mastodon after the event.

I wished that we could reach more people in the BarCamp community since I do think that this is a very important topic for the future of the community. However, commercial services seems to be the standard solution for this particular crowd so far.

After I've done my sessions, I was happy to join sessions held by others.

This one was very interesting to me. Tiny presented a number of images and asked the audience whether or not the presented image was generated by an AI or if this is a legit photograph.

She selected good examples of AI images and somewhat problematic examples of photographs. This way, I could not identify a single AI image although some other people do seem to have an eye for that.

The images are from an online survey where roughly 150 people submitted results. One of the most important results I remember was that on average, people are not able to distinguish AI images from photographs.

Sascha gave a good ultra-short introduction on LLMs.

Then he demoed a product he's working on where he limits the set of documents that an AI is using to generate results. By limiting the input set to trustworthy documents only, the quality of the results should be improved.

I've met many people I only meet at community events. Just like a class reunion. ;-)

Plenty of possibilities to talk to nice people and get great ideas.

I wish there were more events like that in Graz throughout the year. So far, I only join Grazer Linuxtage and BarCamp Graz. Maybe I should start traveling to other events in other cities just like I did with 37C3.

Coverage in the Fediverse using the hashtag #bcg24 was poor. The target group might still be on Twitter or on other commercial platforms I tend avoid for reasons. That's a pity.

The main organizers of the previous three BarCamps Christiane Moser and Johannes Lehner did step down in order to focus on new event ideas they are working on.

Their successors are Martin Rottensteiner and Florian Becker.

As always at events like that, people were awesome and contributed to the whole experience by being excellent to each other and help wherever there was possibility.

I'm looking forward to the next BarCamp Graz on May 17th 2025 again at FH Joanneum.