Computing History | Ziegeleipark Mildenberg — Hacker Camp Became a Temporary Networked City

On 13 August 2015, the Chaos Computer Club opened its fifth Chaos Communication Camp at Ziegeleipark Mildenberg, an industrial museum outside Zehdenick. For five days, the former brickworks became a temporary networked city where thousands of participants could camp, build, teach, and debate how digital systems shape public life.

The location mattered. Ring kilns, workshops, rail tracks, and flooded clay pits placed contemporary computing culture inside the remains of an industry that had once supplied Berlin with bricks; the camp overlaid that landscape with tents, stages, power distribution, and communications infrastructure rather than hiding it inside a convention hall.

According to the [official event archive](https://events.ccc.de/camp/2015/wiki/Main_Page), the gathering ran through 17 August and invited participants to bring projects as well as tents. The [location page](https://events.ccc.de/camp/2015/wiki/Static:Location) identifies the exact site at Ziegelei 10 and describes a community-built environment in which organizers provided the basic network, power, food, and illumination while villages and volunteers supplied much of the program.

A [contemporaneous Hackaday dispatch](https://hackaday.com/2015/08/14/chaos-communication-camp-2015-dispatch-from-day-one/) shows how thoroughly communications had become part of the place. Ethernet cables ran from tents to weather-protected “Datenklo” switch points, while local DECT and GSM systems gave campers their own phone network and talks were broadcast around the grounds and streamed beyond them.

The rad1o badge turned admission hardware into a shared software-defined-radio experiment. Thousands were distributed, and participants immediately repaired firmware, added lights, exchanged code, and learned from one another—the camp’s educational model expressed as an object people could modify rather than merely observe.

The program also joined technical practice to civil society. Talks addressed mass surveillance and press freedom, and netzpolitik.org journalists discussed the recently opened treason investigation over their reporting; placing those conversations beside workshops and open-hardware projects made security a public, social question rather than only a contest of technical skill.

CCCamp15 did not begin the outdoor hacker-camp tradition, but it demonstrated its mature scale: an old industrial site temporarily reorganized around shared infrastructure, voluntary labor, open experimentation, and digital rights. The aerial record captures that synthesis—museum buildings, lakes, tents, and networked communities occupying the same landscape.

Photo: Clemens Wronski, CC BY-SA 4.0, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chaos_Communication_Camp_2015_aerial.jpg).