Our planning efforts also aim to create and foster a free and open source documentation on building and running a conference. Everything is accessible and documented within a wiki, mailing list, pads, and other free and open source tools, provided voluntary and in a decentralized manner for and by the community.
Therefore we try to track some “happenings” in the following timeline. Twitter also serves most of the times as a very good timeline, in general.
Please be aware that a lot ongoing things will not be covered here: things that are all-timers for this year, e.g. watching out for venues, learn about shipping and customs, include and contact people, design, and sooo many things more!
As usual this documentation might not be covering the very latest happenings, as documentation always comes at last…. Check our mailinglist and the @hillhacks twitter account for ongoing activities. Also, there are huge gaps in between. But it can still give an idea, whats going on :)
The seeds for hillhacks started out from a discussion with Ritu and Tenzing, the organizers for the Dharamsala International Film Festival and Akiba, an open source hardware developer from Japan. They were discussing the possibility of doing an art&technology event in Dharamsala that centered on hands-on workshops. The main purpose would be to expose local residents and children to digital fabrication and many of the things that are possible today. Since Dharamsala is remotely located in the Himalayan foothills, digital fabrication seems an ideal skill to have since people could fab hard-to-find/get tools or fixtures on demand. One focus of the event at that time would be to get some digital fabrication equipment to the area such as a laser cutter that could stay in Dharamsala and be put to use. Since then the scope of the event has become much broader, although this is still included and the fabrication tools have already been purchased and are on their way to Dharamsala.
At the time of the discussion, Ritu and Tenzing's website was also under attack by malicious hackers. Dharamsala is one of the most hacked places on earth due to the political significance of the Tibetan community-in-exile. We discussed the possibility of having a network security side to the event as well.
Half a year later sva met Ritu and Tenzing when she was living in the local hackbase in Rakkar near Dharamshala: It was at the end of a six month period in India, wherein she had explored this place as a country of amazingly skilled technologists, whereas those techies seldom play around with technology just for curiousity and the joy of it. Seen from the perspective of the Indian society, doing “work” without getting money, learning and gathering knowledge without any certificate is not appreciated much. Sva's background is with the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Germany, where it could be seen as the opposite. By giving talks, organizing cryptoparties and attending other events across India she got the feeling, that there are plenty of people who would like to contribute to an open information society, but often feel alone, not confident or just don't know where to begin. She was asked: “Why don't we have something like CCC in India?” Her answer was: “Just get together and start!”, and the idea of an hacking and making event was born.
On meeting sva the two filmmakers promptly connected her to Akiba, and soon the two ideas merged into this happening in the foothills of the Himalayas. Meanwhile many people and organizations started to donate time, money and effort to help flesh the event out.