Hacking Village at SFSCON 2026
Crane Hall | 13th–14th November 2026
The Hacking Village is the interactive playground of SFSCON. For two days, Crane Hall will host exhibitions, demos and showcases that bring Free Software, open technologies, digital heritage and robotics to life. Visitors can explore technologies hands-on, meet the people and communities behind them and discover how open approaches can preserve, rethink and shape our digital world.
Venue: Crane Hall – Hacking Village
Explore the Hacking Village
Digital Freedom across time: Preserving/Reimagining/Evolving the Ephemera
Augmented Reality & Free Software
Digital Freedom across time: Preserving/Reimagining/Evolving the Ephemera
Digital technologies are often associated with permanence, yet hardware fails, interfaces change, software evolves, standards become obsolete and data can disappear inside proprietary technological stacks.
This interactive exhibition of historical computers explores how Free Software and Open Technologies can help preserve, reimagine and evolve our digital heritage.
Through a series of interactive micro-exhibits featuring historical hardware, games and creative coding, visitors can experience both faithful reconstructions and contemporary reinterpretations of past technologies. Some exhibits create genuine “time paradoxes”: retro hardware that never existed, modern releases running on decades-old machines and new interpretations of older software.
A “desk of curiosities” will also showcase fragments of computing ideas that appeared and disappeared over time – possible technological futures that could have been and perhaps could still be rediscovered.
Rather than treating preservation simply as an exercise in nostalgia, the exhibition invites visitors to consider what old technologies can still teach us and how Free Software and Open Technologies can extend their lifetime long enough for those lessons to emerge.
Telmekom Robotics
Discover how smart robotics can support people and improve everyday operations across hospitality, restaurants, commercial environments and industry.
Telmekom Robotics presents robotic solutions ranging from commercial cleaning and delivery robots to industrial delivery systems, combining intelligent navigation with technologies designed to streamline repetitive tasks and improve operational efficiency.
Visitors can see robotics in action and explore practical applications such as order delivery, dish collection, cleaning and internal logistics – examples of how autonomous systems can support staff and integrate into real working environments.
→ More info
Supported by Telmekom
Augmented Reality & Free Software
Explore the next generation of extended reality (XR) through Free Software, open standards and real-world data.
Linked to the workshop From XR Prototypes to Intelligent Spatial Applications: Building OpenXR Experiences with Godot, this space showcases how Godot Engine and OpenXR can be used to create portable XR applications across different devices while remaining based on open standards.
Visitors can discover live prototypes combining immersive environments with contextual AI, voice interaction and computer vision, as well as examples of how Open Data Hub datasets can bring real-world information such as spatial data, points of interest and environmental data into mixed-reality experiences.
The demo offers a practical look at how Free Software, Open Standards and Open Data can be combined to build flexible and interoperable XR applications and explore the next generation of spatial computing.
