Twenty Years of ShmooCon
At the final ShmooCon in 2025, members of Kopidion presented a talk entitled "Hacker Rock and Roll: Visualizing the 20-year evolution of ShmooCon research." This ambitious project involved tracking down all the main stage (plenary and track) talks from ShmooCon over the years, developing a new taxonomy of hacker community research, labeling the talks, and analyzing the results. As part of the project, we released two art pieces based on the data (shown above), one suitable for a poster and the other suitable for a canvas print.
ShmooCon dataset v01 (xls format)
poster and artwork (note: ~150MB)
parsing code, graph generation code, and sample files
Updated ShmooCon Dataset
We continued working on the project and in September 2025 we released an updated version of the ShmooCon dataset. This version added speakers, abstracts, links to talk videos, and source information for all 800 main stage talks, we also added all 128 Firetalks.
ShmooCon dataset v02 (xls format)
We'd like to sincerely thank Archive.org, YouTube, Thinkst CITATION, InfoCon, InfoConDB, and the myriad volunteers at the Shmoo Group and beyond, who helped preserve this important history.