“Hackmeeting” hosts workshops, conferences, cyber art performances, fosters spontaneous discussion, and much more. Each proposed activity, though, is meant as a facet of a philosophical framework based on sharing, openness, decentralization, free access, human evolution and aimed at a political outcome. Hackmeeting is organized by a community of hackers unique in the world for its desire to funnel the hacker ethics into political activism, far beyond the limits of the technological environment. The “Hackmeeting” community thinks hacking is a tool to alter reality and society as a whole.
The “Hackmeeting” is usually a three-day event and is completely self-organized through an open and non-moderated mailing list (https:// www.autistici.org/mailman/listinfo/hackmeeting) and wiki (http://hackmeeting.org/_wiki/index.php?title=Pagina_principale), as well as a local live meeting in the city that is holding the next one. It often takes place in social centers, community spaces and squats, to stress the close relationship between hacking and the underground political scene. (http://aia.mahost.org/pro_spaces.html)
The first two days are dedicated to workshops, conferences and debates. The third is usually dedicated to a big plenum, where all the participants analyze new ideas and possibilities pointed out during the meeting, sum up all the event and reflect and examine projects for the future. For the first time ever, this year’s “Hackmeeting” was preceded by a warm up, to reach as many people as possible. The warm up was a series of events in various universities in Milan (Accademia di belle arti di Brera, Fisica, Bovisa, Bicocca, Scienze politiche, and Cascina Torchiera), between June 9 and 18. These were open conferences presented by researchers, experts, activists on ethics and hackers’ culture issues such as hacking and net art history, open-source, fear-embedded and surveillance-bulimic societies, information security and social control issues, open design and 3D animation, peer-to-peer economy, ecohacking (hacker approach to ecology).
The “Hackmeeting” itself took place in Sos Fornace, Rho, (sosfornace.org) from June 19 to 21: three days of workshops, lan space, sharing, meetings, discussions on free software, code, net neutrality, peer-to-peer and also digital countercultures, economies without capital, free speech against repression. Dedicated to the people who have adopted a critical and proactive approach towards the advancement of new technologies— which are more and more tied to social control, the business of war and the commercialization of every vital space.

Hackmeeting is a twelve-year-old story. It was born in 1998 and has been held every year since then, all over Italy, from north to south, in Florence, Milan, Rome, Bologna, Turin, Pisa, Genoa, Naples, Palermo, Catania, Parma. It has brought together nerds, cyber activists, geeks, techies, but also anyone who cared to subscribe to a general definition of hacking as changing one’s own life to suit one’s own desire, overcoming limits and borders, self-managing tools and spaces. The Hackmeeting has always focused on open hardware and free software, on digital countercultures, economies without capital, free speech against repression, and tried to point out the evolution and the impact of computers and electronic communication on the information system and on all of our lives.