Welcome to Kiwicon 2038AD
The Johnnycab enunciates: "You will soon arrive at your destination"
Ticket Pickup:
Ticket pickup is available on Thursday afternoon (2pm-6pm) at the ground floor of the Michael Fowler Centre, (“MFC”; the main con venue).
On Friday, ticket pickup will be open at the MFC downstairs foyer from 7:30am, and from 8:15am on Saturday. To pick up your ticket, you’ll need to know your order number, and ideally your name. You do remember that, right?
We’re really going to need everyone’s help to get through the sheer volume of ticket pickups - Kiwicon 2038 has more people than years. If you can pick up on Thursday afternoon, please do so.
You’ll need to wear your Kiwicon2038 badge and lanyard visibly at all times during the ‘con.
Merchandise Pickup:
If you’ve pre-ordered Kiwicon tshirts or hoodies, collect them upstairs in the Renouf Foyer in the MFC. You can do this on Thursday afternoon, or during the con on Friday/Saturday. You’ll need your merch order number (which may be different from your ticket number if you bought them separately).
If you didn’t pre-buy merch, there will be limited cash sales of t-shirts available, starting lunchtime Friday. No hoodies are available for cash.
Other Things:
Beyond the main con there’s the all new capture the flag competition, the ninth installment of Te Kuiti Warrior, a swag-store filled with all sorts of hacker goodies to buy. Kiwicon At The Movies will screen the original "Blade Runner" on Friday night at the MFC. On Thursday night there is the Kiwicon Girl Geek Dinner, tickets are available here.
On Saturday night, join us at the afterparty at Leroy's, 2 Plimmers Steps, some 9 mins walk from the MFC. You must bring your badge to attend the afterparty.
Code of Conduct & Behavior:
We remind you that Kiwicon has a Code of Conduct, which you can read here, with some FAQs here. This applies to the con, all associated events, and, we’d like to think, daily life; summarised thusly “don’t be an asshole”. Please be excellent to the (very classy, very brass and glass) venue, staff, volunteers, Crüe, and each other. Kiwicon is huge, dense with people, exciting, has alcohol, flames, and a lack of sleeping patterns. There’s a lot going on, and for this to work, we need everyone to Be Excellent To Each Other. Please do so.
If you find yourself in a situation where you’re uncomfortable, need help, or something’s going on, find a volunteer - most likely to be at the registration desk, or otherwise in an orange lanyard, Crüe member, or MFC venue staff-member. If everything gets overwhelming, we have a Quiet Room on level 3 above the Renouf foyer, where you can get away for a bit and chill. Similarly, if you’re not into alcohol, there’s Kiwicon branded soft drinks, and some friends of Bill about.
Comms:
The Kiwicon website has the schedule, and we’ll be relying on Twitter for immediate comms during the event, as getting to our hacker-proof website-CMS on the road is hard! Follow @kiwicon on Twitter for the latest.
The Call for Papers has closed, and we're working through the very many submissions. We'll update with the final schedule this week, and then we'll tend to the ticket waitlist.
There'll also be a few other updates as the all new Capture the Flag competition, and other such events get sorted.
There's some training tickets still available for purchase for some of the classes, and if you're after a free one, you can still apply for that.
General availabiltiy tickets are sold out, but we do have a reserve pool. There's a form where you can add your name to the waiting list.
If you've got a DISCOUNT CODE for a ticket because your employer or someone bought you one that you need to redeem, you should go through the ticket purchase process like normal, and stick the DISCOUNT CODE in the right place. You will also need the LATE PASS code, which you will also have gotten already.
Merchandise and training ticketing will continue to work like normal.
Sorry its all gotten difficult - we can't make the venue magically bigger.
The initial pool of 1800 tickets has, in less than three days, sold out (which is utter madness). We have 300 in reserve, but we're taking a pause to figure out how we're going to manage distributing those equitably.
If you have a corporate bulk-purchase ticket (i.e. we've already invoiced your employer, and they've given you a DISCOUNT CODE to use on the site) we're holding tickets for you, so don't worry. You still need to complete the registration process here, but you'll recieve instructions on how to do this from them.
We'll put up some kind of waiting list sign-up process soon, but yknow, we've all got day jobs we're supposed to be doign right now, so check back in a day or two, or follow @kiwicon on twitter for real-timey-ness.
Thanks for your support, we're rather :O and humbled at how much y'all missed us.
<3
The Kiwicon Crüe
It is the year 2038AD. The dystopic cyberpunk future has well and truly set in; high tech multinationals transcend the authority of nation states, and autonomous drones commit extra-judicial killings based on metadata. Artificial intelligences and machine learning dominate decision making. The algorithm is all. The algorithm can never be questioned.
Wearable computers and ubiquitious encryption emancipate ideas. Simultaneously, people are disenfranchised in a post-capitalist feudal nightmare. The planet cooks for proof-of-work while the glittering towers of imaginary unending economic growth climb ever towards the starless, polluted skies.
(it's good this is just cheap cyberpunk science-fiction trope ripoff scene setting, otherwise it'd be grim af...)
Kiwicon 2038 is here. Friday 16 and Saturday 17 November 2018 in the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington. There'll be the usual set of training and other shindigs going on around the con, details of which will emerge like the data-chip from your deck.
Ticket sales begin... now (the first thousand anyway, let's see how long those last eh?).
See you at the 'con, console cowboys,
<3
The Kiwicon Crüe
P.S. Wondering about the weird background pictures? So we (okay, it was pruby) uhh - for serious, not making this up - trained a machine learning neural net on a bunch of cyberpunk cityscapes, then had it grind up a rather non-trivial amount of GPU cycles cyberpunkify-ing metl's daytime photos of Wellington...