At last year’s Bergtagung, the wiki proved less of a success than we had hoped for. We do want to keep our information editable for everyone, so the spirit of a wiki is fine, but that means we have to maintain two separate systems and battle spammers on both fronts.

So for this year, we will shut down the wiki and simply put our call for contributions here on the blog. The static content from the wiki will be migrated into static blog pages. If anyone else wants a blog editing account, for example for liveblogging, feel free to poke one of us about it. Let’s give this a try.

There’s a time-lapse video of the Bergtagung 2007 webcam, which dutifully saved all the pictures it transmitted to the intarweb. And what do you know, we also have a YouTube link. Original video is in XviD format, no audio, and will be uploaded as soon as time permits.

The Bergtagung concluded yesterday in a frenzy of cleaning. After a good three hour walk up a random mountain, where five of us ate dried meat, enjoyed the view into the valley and sat on a bench like proper elderly mountain people, we headed back to the village to give the Bergtagung building a good scrubbing. I think people still managed to enjoy themselves even though everyone was horribly tired at this point.

Cleaning everything up took half an hour longer than I expected, but in the end we did manage to restore everything to its old state and get our butts into the cars heading for Zürich. On the way up, people had escaped a rainy, cold Zürich to end up above the fog in the sunny mountains. On the way down, we drove into a marvellous sunset above Switzerland’s busiest city.

Thank you, everyone, for a fantastic event! Thanks to the speakers who prepared and gave their talks. And thanks in particular to the “volunteers” who stayed until the end and therefore had the honor to do most of the cleaning. I hope you’re not too traumatized

I hope to see you all again next year, and who knows, perhaps we’ll manage to rent that other house, the charming little wooden one that I wanted in the first place but that seems to be illegal to rent at the moment due to fire regulations

The Bergtagung 2007 has ended Sunday afternoon, the 22th of July. The participants can send us their pics (to Ramon or Alex). The next Bergtagung is probably going to take place in a year at the same place around the same time. Stay tuned.

There are some photos of the barbecue and the talks available in the gallery.

Well well! Long time no time for liveblogging, and to be honest, I suck at it. But here’s just something to give you an update on the last 24 hours, which were quite eventful.

We had our first arrivals yesterday afternoon when Pei and Tobi found their way from the postbus station to the school building. After showing them around I made them housesit while I went and picked up Shane and Gino in Chur as well as Ana and Henner in Ilanz. We put the 2.5 kg of Open Sauce ™ to good use and managed to have something on the table around 21:00, when Lars and Bernhard got here in their old Volvo

Boring? Nooo! This morning Lars discovered that he’d lost his wallet, and what started as yummy cheerful breakfast turned into hunt-the-wallet. We drove all the way down to the Shell station in Schluein where we thought an evil hitchhiking local bum might have stolen it when he got out of Lars’ car, but it wasn’t there, and of course privacy laws wouldn’t let us look at the security cam footage.

We looked under every car and into every garbage can near the gas station, but no wallet anywhere. Bleh. We decided to move to Ilanz to buy meat and salad and various yummities for dinner, and Lars spent the next few hours calling all sorts of credit card companies and banks to have all his cards blocked. Bleh again. Back in Siat, the fridge is exploding as we’re cramming more and more meat and beer into it, and what did Bernhard find? Lars wallet

So there, happy end for you! We’re all very grateful here and enjoying our first celebratory beers of the day. Later there’ll be barbecue, playing football and volleyball out here (as you can see on the webcam) and then the talks begin. Funky!

Apart from that, several people are taking walks right now and enjoying the sun while the rest of Switzerland is covered in thunderstorms. It’s sunny and fantastic here. You should be here too. Nya nya!

I just finished preparing 2.5 kg of tomato sauce down in the kitchen. I’m quite happy with the kitchen utensils they gave us, only the can openers are a bit ancient. They don’t have good grip, so I ended up slipping and getting tomato juice all over my GNU Age/FSFE t-shirt with the levitating gnu. Disastrous!

But the good news is that you’ll have 2.5 kg of purely vegan tomato sauce that you can base your own derivatives on. Add minced meat to get bolognese etc. The sauce is, if you will, part of the Creative Commons and waiting to be built upon.

Join us on IRC chat.freenode.net channel #bergtagung

There is an ancient, really ancient webcam pointing out the window of our classroom right now, as evidenced by the picture above. The colors are off, it’s not focused properly, it has a plastic lens and all in all cost about EUR 2 to manufacture. Ah, how it reminds me of the sweet webcam hype of 1996.

I will make it its own little page that you can reload all by yourself, like in the good old days!

Oh my, it even has a pixel font timestamp. I’m melting with joy!

Ayayay! We’re almost out of good beds! Even though “good” might be stretching it a bit.

Now don’t be alarmed. Some of the people who signed up only signed up tentatively anyway, and we will simply sell their corpses to science if they do show up. Then you can have their beds. But all in all: YES, there are still several good beds left, but the later you sign up, the more likely that you won’t get one of them. I’ve changed the participants page so that everyone notices this.

If you want an up-to-the-minute report on the bed situation, do not hesitate to call me anytime! You can find my mobile number in the wiki.