Infrastructure Review - EMF 2026

Thank you for joining us on stage A. Um, I know that everybody's a super grateful to these folks, so I'm going to say a big thank you to the infrastructure team. We're going to run through everything that's made this camp so amazing this weekend. Um, I'll pass it to Russ to do the introduction. Thanks. >> [applause] >> One, two, one, two, there we go. Hello. Uh, welcome to this, uh, new game of multi- massively multiplayer PowerPoint karaoke. I don't know if the slide deck's still being edited. It is, very good. Uh, thankfully I don't have to PowerPoint karaoke most of it this time because, uh, we have way more people on the infrastructure crew who will be, uh, hopefully talking about their own sides of it, but I will get started with a little bit of an intro. So, this year has really felt like EMF is a different event because of the size, I think, for for a lot of us. It's gone from like, "Oh, it's quite fun to actually run it like a little event." to actually like, "Oh, no, we have to be professional and and and really like try and avoid getting people burnt out, which we haven't been a a terribly good terribly good at so far. Um, there were 300 build-up volunteers on site on day zero, which was last Wednesday. Um, there are four 340 users in our single sign-on system now, and those are the people who are actually working on getting the event running and and and who are like kind of the core augur. Uh, we had have 81 structures on site now from six suppliers. We had 51 structures in 2024. That is a just a phenomenal amount of tents. I can't begin to like describe how tedious it is to try and organize this number of tents, which I've almost had had to do almost single-handedly this time. So, if anybody is is up for that challenge next time, I am looking to delegate it. We have 588 m of temporary water pipes supplying 23 water points. 750, sorry, I've been told. We put more down. And and the whole water operation now has its own team with with all of that going on, we've been testing the limits of that quite substantially this time. 59 fire extinguisher points, each of which has at least two fire extinguishers, 20 km of power cable, and more content on more stages running for longer. That means That's good. That's the good bit. >> [applause] >> The bad bit is that this is like a significant operational challenge to run now. And I'm like was very glad this year that I've been moonlighting as an event controller at Glastonbury for a few years, cuz it's really helped to try and to really help to me to manage what's going on now. We had multiple medical emergencies. The hot weather has really increased the workload there. Many more minor medical and welfare issues. Several people we've unfortunately had to eject from the site, which is a whole process we have to go through, which is tedious and requires is no nobody wants to do this. Please don't make me chuck you out. I would very much prefer not to chuck you out. We've comprehensively tested the limits of the mains water supply, as you can see today. Um There is literally there's a 63 mm diameter pipe that comes into the site, and we're just using all of it. Somebody woke me up this morning and told me there was no water, which was not correct. Please don't tell me there's no water. That is a very bad thing. We've had power grid and battery issues as well, which thankfully, fingers crossed, have not caused us any problem during the main event, but it's it's it's been a bit of a challenge getting that up and running and a lot of supplier liaison and nonsense which I think the power team will get into. Uh we've got this year we have two new new teams. Event Ops is basically running the event um led by Pez here and uh and a lot of what my job is as well. And welfare um le- uh which was set up very very last minute by Paul has been doing incredible job. Um there really are quite a lot of welfare issues to deal with on a on a an event this size. So um both of these have been doing extremely well but also kind of burning everybody out on them. So uh next time we need more people who have experience with in these things. If you have experience in these things, please let me know. Um a permanent infrastructure which is the bit of the EMF which keeps running between events is now 10 servers running email and Nextcloud and Grist and all of these things all Mattermost now. We have Mattermost. We have We have We're using PostGIS for for for the site planning these days. That in itself is like a full-time job to to manage all of that infrastructure. Now we like to try and host our own infrastructure but by God is it a pain in the ass. Um next time hopefully we will have finally ditched GitHub and finally ditched Google but uh no complete promises there. Um >> [applause] >> one thing at a time and uh and there's quite a lot of things going on at once. So I'm now going to hand you over to Pez to talk about Event Ops. >> How many slides can we get with that? >> Clicker. [applause] Hello everyone. This is the first talk I've attended so that's fun. Uh quite a lot of org don't get to see any talks. Uh first of all I don't know what my slide I'm on. >> Right. >> Uh this is my lovely Event Ops team. Almost all of them are in the picture. If you see them, please say thank you. They are the ones fielding your phone calls and your radio calls and external suppliers ringing us and everything else that's going on and triaging everything happening around site. This is the first time we've been an explicitly dedicated team and it has made a massive difference to help triage things for HQ and shield some of the admin team from what's going on and reduce the miscommunication a little bit. My team are editing the slides as we speak, so we're going to see how this goes. They are in a different order than when I left them. Another shot of the team. We took a 2-hour off-team offsite to go and play the coffee shop escape room in Nollag Street earlier today. It was incredibly efficient. We almost made a grist just nail that down. The team who were the Dream Cat team who watched us making it said it was the most efficient team they'd witnessed and I tried really really really hard not to manage despite the fact that we had the other half of the team running event operations from the front there while uh while they were also submitting coffee shop orders for things like stop everyone please stop, which I had to shout out and everyone stopped, which was really quite difficult. Uh over 550 tasks created across the build-up and the event. Kanban board is so long it's broken. You can't scroll the page. It goes miles off the bottom there. Uh there's a lot of things including more than 30 reports of low water pressure today including >> [laughter] >> which included several three phones ringing at once and people triaging the same report at exactly the same time. So thank you for letting us know. We were aware. Uh this is how the site looked on day minus nine. That is the site's official generator for the first two uh days of site that you can see there. We imported uh 35.6 kilowatt hours of power from Belgium. I drove it here and powered the site from it. The power grid was a terrible terrible spider network by the time we were finished. But it worked. It worked. We tested vehicle to load. It was fine. The only time it broke is when crew woke up and tried to turn on three coffee machines at the same time. Uh did not like that. Was very upset. Uh we have moved a ridiculous amount of things including we coordinated the movement of ridiculous amount of things including all the fans, all the all the all the furniture, all the tables, etc. Uh I've two of my favorite photos there. This is where in the bottom left of one of our telehandler drivers dropped their load in front of senior Orga who were doing a site review at the time. Very embarrassing. Thank you, Yaron. And this truck that was really enjoying being the center of attention as we unloaded it from both sides. It's having a good day. There was 1.6 tons of bottled water imported via Luton. You drink a lot of water. This year we've been trying to have people reuse their bottles. We've been asking people to sharpie on top of them. Please reuse them rather than wasting your bottles. There were seven radios lost and recovered. Please remember to check your radios in and out. The radio that was lost for the longest, which was seven days, was my radio which I never checked out and totally forgot to. And then my team had been trying to track me down for three days before they realized it was our radio. Fires. You get fires. It's really dry. You may have seen a change in policy for this year to please don't set fire to the site. Well, that was should always be the case. Of note, two bin fires of note, two fire extinguishers accidentally deployed by crew, one of which into their face, slightly unfortunately. Uh two deployed on purpose. We have three spicy pillows, one proper lipo fire that occurred this morning. Uh it's currently in quarantine in spicy pillow soup in front of HQ. Please don't touch it. Uh yes, this is the correct procedure for lipos submerged in water. On a tiny serious note, please do not charge lipos unattended. They do explode, especially in the real extreme heat we've got here. Uh and this one was in a sealed lipo bag and it made this small fire way smaller than it would have been. Uh so, thank you to the village that did that. Oh, cool, a new slide. Uh Fun. [laughter] Uh there are 1,231 km of past journeys, 68 passengers squeezed onto one bus. I believe we also had a overflow minibus that helped cuz they happened to be there. Let's see what happens when we press next. The slide ended. Fantastic. I'm handing over to site team. Thank you, everyone. >> [applause] >> Back to me, is it? Or is Benny doing it? Any any any advance on me on this one? Okay, here we go. Uh this one is genuine PowerPoint karaoke cuz I haven't seen it at all. Um we had a bunch of very shiny JCB telehandlers. Well, some of them were shiny, and some of them were less shiny, and one of them didn't really work, but uh we made do. Three telehandlers this time, just about enough, maybe four next time. Oh god. Um we had some interesting Chinese uh cherry pickers, which had some interesting features where they would decide you were on a hill halfway up, so you'd go up, and then it would like, "Oh, actually, you're on a you're on a slope, so you can't go down." Which is uh not ideal. Um No, you can't slew. That was the problem. So, uh not not a big fan of these. They're red, though, which is nice. Um We got 1.2 km of festoon, 100 110 L bins, never enough gazebos. We really had a this gazebo thing was that's included in my 81 structures, like about 12 3x3 gazebos that we had to um try and source, and then we were like, "Oh, we've got enough now." And then somebody was like, "Oh, can I get a gazebo for that?" And it's like, uh I don't know with gazebos. Um We have two 10-ft and one 20-ft container of long-term storage now. We'll probably need a bit more, who knows. Um I said 81 temporary structures, 550 m of meters of timber, and and and and and over a ton of sheet timber that was used by the used by the um construction team. Anyway, now I will hand you over to the power team. >> [applause] >> Hello everybody. My name's Laurie and I'm one of the one of the power team. Electromagnetic field is one of the weirdest power for festival power for festivals of any other festival. All other festivals typically have a generator per stage, something like that. And obviously you don't get power to your tent. So EMF is quite a considerable harder problem and challenge to solve. Previously we had four generators across the site. Although this year we've done a little bit of consolidation and we moved down to three generators. One of the reasons for that was trying to improve efficiency on diesel. If you load your generator up a bit more to more more towards its maximum, you can get better diesel efficiency and that's generally better. And in the processing of doing that we also moved to stage five generators which take adblue, generally better for the environment. And on the plus side you may have noticed they're a bit quieter this year than previous years which has been quite well impressed. >> [applause] >> Here's us unloading the generator and we've got a battery there which I'll talk about a bit in the moment. And that's one of our 40 ton curtain siders which didn't contain everything. We have so much stuff. I'll get to the statistics in a bit. >> [snorts] >> We had two big batteries this year. This was again to try and keep it even quieter, maybe turn the generators off overnight and improve efficiency by loading up generators with by charging the battery and then letting the battery discharge over a long period of time. Overnight we tend to see sort of small loads, so in the 40 30 40 kilowatt range which on a big 200 KVA generator means that we should be able to once on a battery last for a bit longer time. Um the batteries we had were 150 KVA, 150 kilowatt hours for those who are interested. Uh LFP cells in a big series set. And I will do a live mic swap. Oh, oh it's turned off. Check. Hello, there we go. Hopefully this one's a bit better. So yeah, LFP cells in a series arrangement uh giving 725 volts DC bus that then gets inverted and gives us some lovely power. Unfortunately, like us, the batteries did not enjoy the heat and we had a number of issues, especially early on, where the uh the uh batteries would uh shut down from typically a differential temperature, so not that they were just too hot, but that one side of the battery would get too hot compared to the other side, and that would trip the generator uh trip the battery off, and then the generator would have to start back up again later on. Uh we tried to mitigate this by putting shade over them, which was mildly successful, and we did have engineers come out and managed to uh revive one of the batteries into working, but unfortunately the battery in the north grid running null sector and volunteer catering, mostly from the heat and the amount of load we were putting on it, uh is currently switched off because otherwise it will just keep tripping out, and power outages are annoying. Uh here's some lovely graphs. Because we have grids with generators and batteries, the top left is the generator load, which turns on and off, which is quite a funky now. Uh you can see the battery on the top right with the charge going up and down as we discharge it in a lovely sortive fashion uh pattern. And what else am I supposed to talk about on this slide? Uh quite a lot of power. Uh we hit a peak load on the north grid, mostly due to null sector and the volunteer catering again of 200 kVA. Uh just briefly hitting the warning limit on the generator, but I think appropriate usage of that. Um we, like a lot of other teams, wrote our own bits of custom software and maintained other bits. So, we have a whole planning system uh that pulls in from the GIS and generates the uh the original map. And then, we also have the distro and all that sort of jazz. Uh no, I don't think it's my radio causing the interference, I'm afraid. Um and also outage monitoring, which is at the bottom right, which is something new we've been trying out this year. And that is hopefully improves our response time. We see when stuff goes out pretty quickly. Um but we still have some work to do on that, and there's always improvements that can be made. Uh testing. Uh this was uh for our testing. Uh I feel like I'm getting quieter and quieter. Uh That's any technical information, if you want that. And here's the final statistics. We got 20 km of cable, 22 tons of cable and distro that we have to handball into the field and then get back out again. Uh 405 m of power lock, six different supplies to Rangle, and the kitchen used a total of so far 1.8 MWh of energy. And that is just volunteer catering, never mind everyone else on site. And yes, the kitchen is all electric this year. So, no gas, hence the big electricity bill. Right, I'm moving on to water. Who's taking water? Yeah, Russ Russ is here. Hello. [applause] It's me again. Me again. So, yeah, this this is the second EMF with a dedicated water team, and which is now five people. The actually running the water at this event is is is a significant endeavor. It's not it it it may it may just be simple, right? You put a hose on the tap and it comes out, right? But you've got to do managing the pressure and and and water safety at and all of this kind of nonsense. So, the the good news is we did put a buffer tank on the volunteer kitchen, which was a very good idea because otherwise we'd be completely screwed at the moment. And that stores 10,000 L of water and lets us fill it slowly when when the kitchen's not use it using very much. We also, of course, got to get rid of all that water once we've used it. So, we have loads of waste tank waste tanks and a contractor on site who pumps them out and takes them away. A lot of certain other events sometimes will just let their showers drain wherever into the into the water courses, but we are in a site of special scientific interest, so that kind of that kind of stuff does definitely doesn't fly here. So, we have to take all your water away. We've put pressure reduction valves everywhere now, so so we can control we can stop the water points which are further downhill from pulling more water than the ones that are further uphill, at least in theory. But even even with those we are hitting the limits. 750 m of fresh water pipes, 11 pressure reduction valves, eight taps on a stick, seven sinks, six hand wash stations. Oh yeah, we've used lots of water. I think we've used more than that. I think I think our waste provider said he chucked away 100,000 L of water on Friday. So, I think we'll probably use about four three 400,000 L in total. But we'll see. We'll see when the water bill comes in. That'll probably cost about like 200 quid in water, but Yeah, so the the heat the the the heat has resulted in high demand on and off site. So, more people are having showers here and they're having them So, probably some people are having them twice a day because because it's hot. And so and everybody else elsewhere is having showers and using water because it's hot. The water pressure is well, I I think it's just cuz we're on the end of a quite a long pipe that goes to the main water main and so there's a bit of a pressure drop over that, but even with all our pressure reduction valves and everything else, we're still not quite managing to to provide enough water to give you all showers. Sorry. Um next time we are going to have to go full, you know, storing a hundreds and hundreds of thousands of liters of water on site to make sure that we have enough water for everybody. That is a job for next time. Many thanks. >> [applause] >> Hello. I'm Luke. I'm one of the two team leads for the network team. We have quite a large team now, which is actually really useful for all of the stuff we have to get done. Um some quick stats. So, we've got most of our equipment from two people this year. One of them is Event Infra. That was all trucked over from the Netherlands. We got almost a ton of total equipment weight including flight cases from them totaling almost 3,200 Ethernet ports. That's 79 switches, 130 access points and two wireless controllers to run it all. Uh from our friends at Pylon One, we got all of our optics and reels and reels of fiber optic. EMF owns a bunch, but actually running the event requires a lot more than we actually have in stock. So, we were really grateful to get some from them and various bits for both internet during build-up before we've actually built out the proper network core, but also just in case of backup and for things where we can't quite span the event network over there. And over the course of the event so far, we've had over 200 Ethernet cable ends crimped. Uh I came in with a pot of 300 hoping that that would be way more than we would possibly need and we've gone through most of it. Uh this is what it looked like when we unloaded the uh van that had just been driven uh all the way from the Netherlands. Uh and uh yeah, there's quite a lot of kit here and an installation which you can probably see uh there in the background, maybe. It's in the plastic tubs. Um we have a bunch of people we need to thank because uh we get equipment from, as I said, Event Emfront Pylon One, Full Fibre and Zoom uh in particular are responsible for looking after and interacting with uh Openreach for our uh actual backhaul to get from the field to uh to the internet, but then uh we have a whole bunch of providers who provide us with uh transit, which is the final bit where we go uh from our network to the rest of the internet. They're the ones who are responsible for connecting us to the actual internet as a whole. So, thanks to them. >> [applause] >> So, uh there's quite a lot of work that we do before uh even uh the event has begun in any sort of sense. Uh so, we made a few visits to the field beforehand so that we could actually get some fiber installed in the ducts that exist. You might see a few few BT labeled manholes around the site. Um some of them have our fiber in them and uh we need to run them through the ducts and we need to put ends on them and so there's some fiber splicing happening in this picture. Um we build all the DK poles. Uh this involves some wood, the signs, and uh the Ohm lights that you see on top as well as the access points to get everyone Wi-Fi. And uh our interesting metric, um we had this hottest switch graph and we suspect that maybe the the temperature sensor in here had gone a bit wrong. Um this caused our like mean temperature metric to reach uh like 900 and something degrees just because this switch was throwing everything else out. Um but like on the whole you can see the the day night cycle and one of the NOC team members had the yellow line that you can see spiking and then disappearing. That was a small switch with no fans that they had in their tent and so that's why it spiked so much higher than everything else. Um this is a graph of the number of people connected to each of the Wi-Fi networks over time and the reason I bring this up is because you can see this gap the one that's the furthest on the right. That gap is where we had our Wi-Fi outage. Sorry about that. We had a small power blip which then resulted in it >> [laughter] >> We had a small power blip which resulted in what we call a cascading failure which is where everyone's phones and everything else trying to get back on the Wi-Fi at the same time meant that our Wi-Fi controllers got overloaded and they started just not letting anyone on the Wi-Fi. So we did a bunch of things to try and fix this as quickly as we could. Sorry about that. I hope the bar didn't get too overwhelmed by people suddenly all wanting to pay in cash for some reason. Um and yeah there are some lovely views from about where the APs are. It's great working on the network team. We have a lot of fun with it and we've had fortunately this event more than some others more time to go on some side quests which has been good. Over to the phone team. >> [applause] [applause] >> So I am Alfie from the phones team. Along with rest of my colleagues we have built a brand new phone system for us all. The thing with these phone systems they are quite a bit different than what you would might expect Um, because it's actually used by not just only our attendees but our staff and our volunteers, it can be quite con- um, what's the word I'm looking for? Um, important. For example, um, using it to make sure that the big Tesco order arrives on time, which is quite useful. Um, because our lovely team in the knock have provided us the ability to offsite communications, we were able to get the patented um, big lunchbox solution to have a whole call system arriving on site well ahead of time than we normally would have in in previous years. Um, hence Russ's phone call well early into the event before anyone was on site. Um, with that I should probably pass on to um, to Connor. >> [applause] >> Hello. Thank you very much. So, this year, um, I If you've been using the phone system, you might have noticed it's got a fresh coat of paint. It looks a bit nicer. Um, we've got some new features all in there. Um, the UI should be a bit nicer to use. Um, and it's a bit shinier overall and hopefully works a bit better. Um, this year as well, we've had all of the extensions get a dedicated phone number that some people have been using. That's quite useful, especially if you don't have a DECT. Um, let's move on. Oh, no, you're not supposed to see that. Cool. So, we've had a brand new phone call this year. Everything is completely fresh. Um, we've built this in I want to say 11 12 weeks. 11, there we go. Um, and I think for the time scale we have, um, I'd like to think we've done a pretty good job uh, considering 99.94% uptime. Um, I can't complain with that. >> [applause] >> Thank you very much. Um how do I make this work? So yeah, new number management, all shiny, and I think that is on to DECT. Let's welcome Steffi. >> Hi, my name's Steph. Uh I do DECT. Uh and okay, here we go. So uh new core, uh new core means we have to have a new software stack for DECT. Basically, the software for DECT just handles the binding process when you put the number into your phone and you get the number you want out. Um new stats exporter, new features, but of course, the main task, did it work? Yes, it worked great. Coverage was fantastic. >> [applause] >> We had 50 RFPs approximately off li- online around the site all over. Thank you to our team for running them out and uh running them around the site in the exceptionally hot weather. Uh it was a thankless job. Uh but we got at least one in Norsaq, which uh thank you to Norsaq too. We dropped this off to them quite early and it got mounted facing the crowd. And you all liked it very much. You have 150 calls per hour on that RFP. It was the busiest RFP for a moment in the entire site. I've no idea how anyone heard anything. But it was there. You did receive the call. Plastic otherwise was uh very okay. Um yeah. Uh Uh, we had some new features. Um, for example, wideband voice support. Uh, we made the decision at the start of the event that you were all getting better audio quality in expense for us needing more RFPs because, um, if you enable wideband voice, you get half the capacity. But, we made it work by having a load of RFPs. We even had one DK with two RFPs in, uh, which is a new thing. Um, we had new features if you lost your phone. Um, for example, you can see the firmware status if you have a Mitel, and you can see the handset location, um, if you lost your phone, you can go on the website and you can check where it is. It might give you a reminder of where you were last sitting, and you can find it again. Um, very useful. We also had visual voicemail. Um, oh dear, the slides have gotten out of order. Hello. >> It hasn't got the most recent updates. >> Okay. Um, I had some stats here, but they are gone. So, I guess I shall be handing over to GSM. Uh, hello. >> [applause] >> We run a 2G network again. You could call people. You could SMS. If you're really lucky, you could even get some packet data. We had Billy, who was modeling over here, uh, set up a website, and it worked on at least two of our phones, even if only for a little bit. Uh, we did have a 4G data network. Uh, Robin, who is probably somewhere in the audience, uh, put a lot of effort into planning it all out, applying for the licenses, getting some small 4G cells. It was like really, really well planned. She was really rewarded for her efforts. She was the only person in the entire camp you could connect. So, she got to enjoy it. Uh, as much as we'd have liked to try and fix it so that everyone could enjoy it, 2G took priority, and we all got a bit busy attending the a Maybe next time. Uh, the network was quite popular. Uh, the 2G network that is. We advertised it a bit more. You bought more SIMs. We bought 100 more. We had like 100 more subscribers. Uh, people turn their phones off when they go to sleep. Uh, which we you know, which is is kind of cool. Uh, we got a lot more professional over antenna mounting. If you saw the NOC slide where they had like the wooden poles, we like actually did some teamwork. So, the the antennas were up there. Still the same like janky Amazon antennas from last time, but you know, it looks professional. Uh, >> [snorts] >> we we and you know, that also meant the cable length was not long enough. And so, the base the base Yes, that's like tucked in, Uh, stack. Very similar to last time. Uh, we used the Osmocom stack. Uh, new change we had PyHSS. Uh, they're like a Python based thing that supports both 2G and 4G. Uh, I had to patch it because it kept stealing people's phones away from like the normal network to the camp network, Uh, we had seven uh, IP access nano base stations and one Sysmocom BTS that we had last time. Uh, positioned in strategic dark and cold across the site to give a really good coverage. Um, as before we had licenses from Ofcom so we could, you know, all doing this legally. Uh, operating on the DCS 1800 band. And in general, I think for GSM, uh, you know, last time it was just me kind of like losing my mind. We did a lot of planning this time. Uh, you know, got everything in. And uh, I think that was really good. We even had a dashboard so you could see our BTSs fill up with calls. Um, we hoped to use this to monitor failures. Uh, but it turned out the counters provided by Osmocom didn't really work. Uh, and talking of failures. So, I said we used we had all those IP access nano BTSs. Those of you who remember last year might remember we hadn't had the most luck with those. Uh, with the higher temperatures this year we had a few more problems. Uh, if you read the data sheet of these things, you'll notice they're only rated up to 45° C ambient temperature. In a confined dark and cold baking in the sun, they don't stand the best chance. We had a joint mission with the NOC. Uh, I don't know if you saw that like really hot switch. This is the dark and cold that was in. We tried to wrap it in a foil blanket. It didn't really work. Uh, they kept rejecting calls. Like you try and place the call and they'd just be like, "Ah, it's too hot today." Uh, and then like not place the call, which is really convenient and not log anything. Uh when it cooled down in the evenings they worked though. So, we were all enjoying the festival and we're like, "What's up with the GSM network?" Go back, and oh they suddenly cooled down and started working again. So, about midway through day one, I made the executive decision to turn off all the IP access on the BCSs. So, we had one reliable Cisco phone one running the entire site. Maybe some of you noticed, maybe some of you didn't. Uh we we were really fed up with these things. Like it took far too much time debugging these. But your stats slide, we had 4,000 completed calls since the start of the festival. Uh we had 1,672 occasions where we might have had completed calls if the BCSs would like to accept our request to do that. Uh we had 16 panic configuration changes by our ops team trying to fix things. Three crash outs. One base station that was shipped to us in the Royal Mail like bag of shame you get when like your box broke in transit, and so we had to do some emergency soldering. Um so yeah, maybe next time we will like diversify our strategy, maybe go with like one huge base station that actually works. Um and you know, maybe not like switch softwares around a few days before the event. Uh one final note from GSM, if you have one of our SIM cards, uh even if you didn't necessarily get it to work on the festival, you can have your keys if you want to run a network at home, uh you can go to the phones website. If you go to services SIMs, it will give you the keys if you want to do something with it. Um There they are, and if you want more details you can email in. And now over to Marold I think for pots. Where are you Marold? Ah okay, Matt's going to do it. Hello. >> [applause] >> WE ARE RUNNING WAY OVER, so I am going to talk straight over you all. Uh 30 slides left. Uh 40 slides left. Here we go. Loads of phones around the site. You all used them loads. Thank you. Um we had fiber to the DK, and people were connecting at that speed in the field. Uh oh, and all of the other slides have gone. So, I'll do it off my laptop. Uh the main thing I want to say here is a many thanks to not just the team, but all of the other people that involved in this. Um thanks to um them for working in 11 weeks on turning this around. Um EMF has some requirements for us to use widely used tools in our critical infrastructure because that makes it easier to maintain, reuse in future events when you consider the inevitability of volunteer churn. So, it was quite an undertaking. So, thanks to Alfie, Billy, Connor, Eta, Eva, Glenn, John, Luke, Marold, Paul, Robin, Steffy, Will, C3G um inferno.co.uk, the eBay sellers who gave us three times as many desk phones as we ordered, and the many other wonderful people who will lend us time, kit, and expertise. And to finish, the DECT stats that we were missing earlier, 323,000 DECT transactions, 12 dropped calls due to overloaded cells. That's 0.025% of them, and zero site-wide outages. Kitchen! >> [applause] >> Hi. I'm Paul. I'm one of the kitchen team leads, and as you'll know, this festival runs on volunteers, and volunteers run on our food. So, um it's really important everything goes well. Um we've had a fantastic year. It's been a massive scale-up operation this year. Um that's not my slide. That's someone found a recipe for happiness and uh hung that up in the kitchen, which uh immediately got vandalized by the real chefs. Uh recipe for a 40 uh for a 44-hour shift, which I think we did once. Um someone came in the next morning and went, "They've not gone home. Uh some numbers we've used 0 kg of gas this year. We are fully on on induction as has been mentioned. Um we've made 200 kg of apple crumble, um which is going to be for dinner tonight. Um four four scheduled deliveries by Booker and then nine actual people having to drive to Booker again because Booker has completely shafted us this year. Um mostly due to them having a power outage 2 days before the festival and losing all of their fresh and frozen stock. Um yeah, that was un-fun. Um so far we've had 174 174 volunteers across 5 days and then 25 also core crew who work for the remaining 5 days without any volunteer support. Um and we had zero major water, power, gas incidents, which is massive. >> [applause] >> About the water, I would thanks to the the buffer tanks, we didn't even realize there was an outage this morning. Uh we've scaled up a bit. Looking at the numbers of what we've ordered, we went from 65 kg of bacon to 175 kg. That's just for breakfast. Uh 92 kg of sausages were going to 171, 200 kg of onions to 400. So, we've basically doubled the amount of food we're serving this year and um all we've done is make the kitchen slightly bigger, which I think is an absolutely epic achievement and the team deserves a huge amount of credit for that. >> [applause] >> And with all that, we managed a 5% reduction in knife injuries. Stages. >> [applause] >> Hello, I'm your bus replacement stages speaker. Um look, we have some stages. I think you can agree they look wonderful. Uh there's a lot of truss, there's a lot of aluminum scaffolding, there's a lot of stage decking, there's a lot of amplifiers, some TVs. Yeah, don't worry about it. And some intelligent LED lights as well. If you get a chance this evening, go up and down the side of stage C cuz it looks really, really cool. Um we also had a caption system. Um this is using Whisper medium model and all data is processed on site. No data is leaving this site. So, that's why we felt comfortable using it for all the talks. >> [applause] >> Null Sector. Hello. Uh my name's Nick. I'm from the Null Sector team. Uh who went to Null Sector this year? >> [cheering] >> Who's going back tonight? Yes, brilliant. Uh so, uh 2026 we had some key goals. We wanted to make the area larger. We wanted to look at people flow. Uh we wanted to add an algorave music Well, Jonty wanted to add an algorave music venue. So, we have an algorave venue. Uh and we wanted to spend more time on world building, scheming, and trying to make the world that Polybius Biotech in the year 2097 lives in cuz that's where you're transported to when you go into Null Sector. Um Charles starts in Fusion 360. He sends me that. I work in Vectorworks. I don't like Fusion, he doesn't like Vectorworks. There we go. Uh that's the drawing. That's the drone picture. I think we got it pretty close. Um >> [applause] >> My favorite bit of feedback I've had so far is why is Null Sector smaller? It's not. It's 45% bigger than 2024. That is seven spaces. We got the dance floor in the algorave tent. We got two bars. If you've not found the secret bar, you haven't tried hard enough. Uh there's 21 vendors across the weekend have sold stuff in our night market. That doesn't include the expansion markets that have been going on in the daytime. We have 27 different art installations either in the container or in the bar or around the space. And one that I think is really nice, having gone to their talk yesterday, is Dream Cargo Arena, a space that's significantly larger than they have with than they had last year, and that's where Over Brewed is. So, everything is bigger in No Sector. Uh we love containers. We love containers. We've got 10 more. I don't know why we did it. It's really annoying. Containers are hard. You got to get them delivered. You got to level some of them. I put three of them 8-ft in the wrong place, so we had to move those again. Uh but containers work really well for noise protection. And as you may have noticed, we're no longer covering the entire North Field in noise. It all goes off into the woods. And it almost works too well because you can stand out outside of No Sector and not realize that there is a gig going on. Which is a problem because someone thought there wasn't a gig going on. Um but no, between uh the stage team and the people we worked with on noise side, I think we've done a really good job of having a really loud dance floor, but not really being able to hear it outside. The only thing you can weirdly hear everywhere on site is Jonty's recorded announcements that happen every 5 minutes. Um I don't know why. It's just that vocal seems to be enough louder than everything else. Um so, somebody's numbers I tried to update mid-talk, but that's fine. We have 160 m of truss. We have 5 km of cable. That number is just at Alexis' cable. I then had to add the power cable higher on. 106 fixture lighting fixtures, 18 speakers, eight panels of video wall, 150 W of lasers, 230 L of isopropyl alcohol for our four flame machines on the roof. We only had one small fire, and me and Russ put it out with some cider. Um >> [applause] >> uh 300 L of smoke fluid, over 40 kW of smoke machines. Yes, I did have to replug many a smoke machine because as much as we had the greatest will in the world to plug them on different circuits, it didn't always happen. Unfortunately, the photo of Luke isn't here, but Luke, who was meant to be our bar manager, was not able to make it to EMF. As mentioned in the opening talk, he fell out of a window 5 weeks ago, tried to recover from that, was doing really well, and then he got food poisoning. So, a huge shout-out to the Null Sector bar team, who have had to scale up to run both bars without Luke being on site. Uh our great and glorious leader, Charles, has also got some mobility issues. So, Charles is now Professor Xavier, and we only had one incident involving the scooter. Finally, we really, really, really have tried hard to make the theming work. We've had a bunch of custom assets, custom audio, custom printing, lots and lots of dialogue. Hopefully, you've enjoyed the little scripted sequences that happened. And on a very final note, if you are creative and like working like what thinking about theming and design and stuff like that, we'd love to hear from you. We love construction people, we love production people, but we want to push for more creative and storytelling in Null Sector next time. Uh oh, what's that? Oh, yeah, yeah, video. >> Hello, I'm going to be very, very quick. We do video, surprisingly. It's streaming, it's on demand. We had five stages, that's two more than last year, and it's two and a half terabytes of raw and encoded video on our file server. It's not actually that impressive, really. Uh we do infobeamers as well. They're on the projectors or doing the parently caption system, and you submitted 100 bits of attendee content. Here are some of my favorites. We are in the tents. We have three BMDA terms. One of them was haunted, seemingly exercised by a firmware update. Here it is displaying half of crab rave offset by half a pitcher. Um in the tents, we had a companion, we had Have deck. The buttons suck, but it's very, very flexible. So, you can control everything from one surface and that was quite convenient. Um and then we had an encoder pushing uh running Votto next to feed the pipeline. Um you may have noticed last year the opening ceremony was released just before the closing ceremony. Um the rest took a little bit longer. Uh this year uh 95 talks released uh already and the rest and the YouTube releases will follow. >> [applause] >> Um and seriously, this would not have been possible without the time uh the equipment time uh the expertise and everything else from our friends from the C3 VOC. Uh so, seriously, many many thanks. >> [applause] >> Um one one more thing as well. Uh we pulled some favors. Uh so, we're happy to announce uh happy to announce our latest service. Uh the EMF stage A feed has been available via AsiaSat 5 for the last 45 minutes. Um there it is. Uh so, yeah. >> [applause] >> Volunteers. I can do volunteers. So, volunteers, thank you very much to everyone who volunteered. You make this event happen. Uh lots of shifts to fill. You did uh there's a box there. I can't see it. Uh 373 shifts per hour being signed up for. Uh now we have 39 different volunteer roles, many of which were made up in the field while we were here. Uh 26.6 weeks of volunteer time or 1 2.5 working years for a single person. Special thanks to people filling slots for lapping in a shipping container in less than 8 hours despite them not counting towards meal tokens. Uh bizarre enthusiasm for 4:30 a.m. shifts driving a golf cart around very slowly with apologies to people who arrived a day early. And the three brave souls who signed up to walk around the site giving the composting toilet wheelie bins a good shake. You're heroes. We won't be shaking your hand. Sorry. >> [applause] >> There's more. People sitting around the lake on Wednesday who stepped up and put the chairs out on the stages. Everyone who responded to our tweet saying that some shifts needed filling almost instantly. And our amazing build and tech and crew who spent extended periods living on a construction site and will still be here long after you have left. Finally, join us. And I think that is it. Thank you very much. Sorry to Robin Ince for running late. And uh >> [applause] >> Yeah, that's it.