I haven't been to any of the other conferences mentioned above but I attended CCC four times so far (twice as a speaker).

For me, one the most striking and pleasant things of the CCC is that it's organized ENTIRELY by volunteers and financed by entrance/membership fees (as far as I know) so there is NOT ONE commercial sponsor to be found. I really really value this highly because today there are almost no places left that commerce/business hasn't invaded yet (most IT conferences feel like marketing events of FB/Google/Microsoft/...)

I haven't seen many (any?) conferences / congresses of this scale that are organized like this (the Burning man might be an example of a similar event, not sure how they finance it though).

And of course the people are amazing and very friendly, and it's a safe space to really be yourself. Also, they really try everything they can to make everyone feel at home, there's even an entire floor dedicated to children (with projects, games, workshops, theather, ...) and one day dedicated especially to young hackers. Where else can you find this kind of stuff?

Their video recording and streaming efforts are also world frickin class. They put commercially sponsored venues to shame in this category alone.

Source: been twice, watched live this year, downloaded all the talks in HD a few days after it ended.

I was pretty much living on German time during the conference, despite watching it from Australia. Even on a fairly pathetic connection I was able to stream the SD streams during the day, and the HD streams during the night. I was even able to fall back to audio-only via Skype for about an hour when they had technical issues at the start of the streaming.

World frickin' class, indeed.

There are commercial sponsors for the Congress, e.g. for some of the network equipment, because it would be uneconomical to buy network equipment and using it only once a year. Nevertheless, sponsorship doesn't play such a big role, there is no advertisement on the venue.

> What about Maker Faire, HOPE, DEF CON, etc.

OK, as someone who's been to all of these.

The team/cooperation part I think he's referring to is that CCC will have a large area dedicated different hackerspaces/assemblies. So c-base gets a corner that they decorate, as does Metalab, while many smaller hackerspaces will have a ~12-seat table dedicated to their group, where they can put up any cool projects they want to show off.

Maker Faire has something similar, where local groups will get an area to show off. HOPE has had some more topic-based assemblies like TOOOL. DEFCON has workshop tracks and more thematic "events" that happen, like DEFCON Shoot or the bike ride, but not as much of groups of real-life co-conspirators making things happen, with the notable exception of 303.

HOPE do have a "hackerspace" area and iirc there is a timetable for projects, but what I think is unique in the c3 is that your space is for the whole event.

I'm not sure what the quote is on about but CCC is older than DEFCON or HOPE.