Notacon is coming up, and it would be cool to get a bunch of people from Toronto to come along.

NOTACON, an annual conference held in Cleveland, Ohio, explores and showcases technologies, philosophy and creativity often overlooked at many “hacker cons”. Our desire is not to supplant other events, but complement them and strike a balance that has gone unnoticed in our community for far too long.

With each new year we build upon the successes and knowledge of the previous years. Our goal is to enlighten, educate, and entertain attendees, presenters, and staff alike. We do this by finding new ways to apply technology to graphics, art, music, or social interaction.

Notacon espouses an ethos of exploration, participation and positive contributions. Hence, while some of the material we may cover is controversial or potentially “black hat” in nature, we feel it is important to openly discuss all topics so that others can learn from the experience and create something good, fun or interesting from it.

Events during Notacon run from Friday morning through Sunday afternoon. These include over 40 presentations, contests such as “Anything but Ethernet”, game shows, prize giveaways and a whole lot of who-knows-what. Anything can happen, and usually does. New in 2009 we will be offering a Thursday night sampler, which will be free of charge and open to the public. More information will be posted as it becomes available.

If you would like to join the community, please explore our getting involved section. Be sure to check out our archives from previous years, featuring information and recordings of our past content.

Last year we had multiple cars head down (it’s only a 5 hour drive to Cleveland), and good times were had by all. It would be great if we could organize a caravan this year and bring as many people as we can to show support for this excellent event.

There will be a “temporary hackerspace” set up at Notacon, with help from people from other spaces including NYC Resistor, HacDC, and the not-yet-opened Pumping Station One. This will include representing and showing off the hacklab: our space, what we’re doing, our projects. Anyone who’d like to help out, whether just by attending or by putting something together to show off, would be very welcome!

A challenge has also been thrown down from people in these other spaces: we should show them (and everyone else) some of the cool things we can do by participating in the Anything But Ethernet competition. This can be the place for us to show off and engage in some friendly competition with our friends in hacker spaces across North America… anyone want to submit something?