BornHack 2021 is over. It was a fantastic event full of all the wonderful, weird, talented, amazing and inspiring people and projects that we've gotten used to (but never tire of). 2021 was in many ways the best BornHack yet:

• We had a record number of visitors – 2021 was the biggest BornHack yet by some margin. We checked in just under 250 full week tickets from the webshop, and on top of that maybe 70 more as a mix of sponsor tickets, one day tickets, child tickets and such. We handed out all the 300 wristbands we ordered, and then had to resort to using wristbands from the previous years!
• We saw more new faces than ever before. Especially big groups of dutch and german people continue to invade BornHack (in the nicest possible way).
• Gender distribution is steadily improving.
• The number of volunteers during buildup, event and teardown has never been higher. Consequently the workload on orga continued the downward trend this year.
• The economy is looking healthy, which is a first.

All in all it was a great event with very few mishaps and accidents. Buildup was smooth, the event was great, and teardown was quick.

While we are proud of our Code of Conduct and the photo policy in it, we still love to see photos from BornHack! Fortunately we already have some fantastic pictures by smtw online (one of them can be seen above), and also some great drone shots by Stitch. The rest of the Photo Team are working on getting theirs online while recovering from BornHack.

2021 was the sixth BornHack, and we chose the tagline Continuous Delivery this year. As usual we leave it up to the participants to interpret any deeper meaning (intentional or not) in the tagline. The tagline was flanked by other silly CI/CD puns, such as this year's akvavit and vodka respectively being named Continuous Inebriation and Continuous Distillery. We still have leftover stock of the booze by the way, so if you find the BornHack village/area at another event you can always ask us if we brought any inventory you can buy.

As mentioned in the previous news item we had a single COVID-19 positive participant (that we know of). We encourage everyone to get PCR tested now that a few days have gone by since the event, and please get in touch if you are infected.

We had a new food vendor this year, Oriental Express, which served asian food and other things. We really liked the food and our impression was that they were popular, so they might return next year. The Food Area worked well again this year. There was almost constant activity with people cooking and eating at weird hours. Like the previous years we sold out all the fridge shelves we had available for rent.

We have two ways you can submit feedback about BornHack. The general feedback form can be used for any feedback about BornHack, good or bad. We've already had some participants leave feedback, but we want more. If you can spare five minutes please go submit some feedback – we want both your positive and negative feedback, it all helps to make the next BornHack better.

Please also remember to submit program feedback by pressing the feedback button on each individual event page. It helps the Content Team make informed decisions about what content worked and what didn't.

The next BornHack will be from the 3rd to the 10th of August 2022. MCH in the Netherlands is in late July and should function as a nice warmup for BornHack. Tickets for BornHack 2022 will go on sale as soon as we get around to it.

Thank you to everyone who was a part of BornHack 2021, both participants and volunteers. A special thanks to the volunteers who stayed on site until we were completely done with teardown. You know who you are. <3

Until next year, take care and all the best from Orga!