The FIRST HACKER CONGRESS in SPAIN

One person alone gets little done, and that’s why communities exist. I’m launching a section on Spain’s hacker communities and I start with the most senior of them all, NoConName, which turns twenty-three this year. To tell its story I’m joined by Nico, already a returning guest on the channel.

He takes me back to the origins, which weren’t in Barcelona but in the Balearics: that first congress in 1999 at a hotel on the seafront promenade of Palma, which he attended at eighteen. Out of it came people who ended up at companies everyone now knows, and the person who best documented all of it was the journalist Mercè Molist. We talk about the format, with its call for papers and those workshops where the speaker has to prove live what they’ve researched, and about how NoConName defends a certain exclusivity against the talk that gets repeated at twenty-seven congresses. Nico admits they juggle a lot with the dates and that their weak spot is the low output during the year and the final rush to pull the congress together.

We also go over its ecosystem, from the Telegram to NCN TV, and why this is still alive: because of the people who put energy into it and give back to the community what it once gave them. A good reminder that together we’re stronger.