Confessions of a Kitchen Troll

Volunteering at Goulash Programming Nights 24

The GPN24 was the annual four-day hacker and maker congress held in Karlsruhe by the local CCC chapter, blending talks, art, and technology. This is a report about volunteering with a disproportionate glow of pride: two kitchen shifts, one tour of duty with a pallet truck full of empty bottles, and a newly earned respect for the people who do the real work.

July 2026

Marin in a white apron and cap in the field kitchen tent, wide-eyed, goulash machine steaming behind him.
My very first shift as a kitchen troll.

There is a specific kind of tiredness that comes when you do physical work.

I stood outside the goulash tent at the end of my first kitchen shift with an aching back, a soaked shirt, hands smelling faintly of industrial detergent, and a grin I could not suppress. I had scrubbed pots for two hours. That was the entire achievement. Some fifteen hundred people were attending this event and hundreds of them were volunteering. I was one of the volunteers. My contribution, measured honestly, rounds to a mere rounding error.

I have rarely been so pleased with myself.

Something else happened in those two hours, though. My respect for the people who keep an event like this alive is now immense: the kitchen crews, the bar staff, the setup and teardown gangs, the whole cheerful volunteer army. It is one thing to applaud the volunteers at a closing ceremony. It is quite another to be winded by two hours instead of attending the talks in an air-conditioned auditorium.

GPN24 ran from June 4^th to June 7^th, 2026, at the ZKM and the HfG in Karlsruhe, organized as ever by Entropia e.V., the Karlsruhe chapter of the Chaos Computer Club. The motto was gpn24.de – Gulasch at the Scale of Chaos, and attendees were cast as "stakeholders" of GPN24.de, a fictional mega-corporation that does everything, everywhere, around the clock.

I've already written about the analog synth workshop I got to contribute to. This article is about the other thing I did at GPN24: the thing that surprised me more.

I became a troll.

The Trolling System

At most Chaos Computer Club events, the volunteers who keep everything running are called angels. At GPN they are called trolls, which must make this the only corner of the internet-adjacent universe where being called a troll is a compliment. Entropia puts it plainly on their own wiki: the trolls are the friendly helpers of the GPN, and without them there would be no GPN.

The whole thing runs on an online system at troll.gulas.ch. It's the same idea as the Engelsystem used at other Chaos events, inevitably rebranded as the Trollsystem. You make an account. You browse the open shifts. You take the ones you want.

The system lists every area that still needs bodies, broken down by task and by time slot: bar, kitchen, info desk, breakfast, video, crowd management, setup, teardown. You can see, at a glance, exactly where the holes are. And then you volunteer.

This is the submit button for when someone says "someone should really do something".

There are no general prerequisites; if you think your health and constitution allow for it, anyone can troll. A few troll types ask you to attend a short introduction first, announced in the system. There's even a talk right after the opening ceremony called Trollen leicht gemacht ("Trolling Made Easy") that walks newcomers through the whole apparatus, recorded on media.ccc.de like everything else, because of course it is.

Watch on Youtube

There is also a Trollhöhle, a troll cave (the trolls' answer to the angels' Heaven at other Chaos events), and the most active trolls receive a goodie with the GPN24 motif plus the right to register early for the next GPN. Aside from the knowledge of a job well done, this is the only reward for volunteering.

I signed up as a kitchen troll. Then, emboldened, as a trash troll.

The main hall of the ZKM from above, rows of orange tables packed with hackers, banners hanging from the balconies.
Fifteen hundred people and their projects, spread across the ZKM.

A Legally Mandated Detour Through Poultry

Before my first kitchen shift, I had to sit through a food hygiene briefing. This is not a GPN quirk. This is German law.

The model for it is §43 of the Infektionsschutzgesetz, the Infection Protection Act. The briefing, known as the Belehrung, is what replaced the old Gesundheitszeugnis, the health certificate, back at the turn of the century. Anyone taking up work in a commercial kitchen, or handling certain categories of food, needs one before they start. In the CCC it is jokingly called the "Frikadellendiplom" (meatball diploma).

A lot of it is common sense. Wash your hands with soap under running water. Dry them on single-use towels. Never cough or sneeze anywhere near food. But there are also some specifics that are not obvious, and the briefing is designed to make sure you know them.

And then one stopped me cold: take off your rings and your wristwatch before you start.

Of course. Obviously. Where else would you like your bacteria to live? In a warm, humid crevice you never clean and never remove? I have worn a watch into kitchens my entire adult life and never once thought of it as livestock housing.

But here's where it gets strange. We were taught about meat, poultry and fish.

GPN's goulash is vegan. It has been for years. It's built on seitan. It contains no meat, no poultry, and no fish (I checked).

To be fair, §43 doesn't care what's in your pot. It enumerates a fixed statutory catalog of foods that trigger the requirement. The CCC and the other organizers don't want to get in the way of the law, so they teach it all.

Shift One: The Pots

Two hours. Mostly cleaning.

The goulash comes out of Gulaschkanonen, or "goulash cannons," mobile field kitchens formerly used by civil protection units. The long-serving GPN trolls are fond of the name. Last year I called the kitchen tents the culinary soul of the event, from the safe distance of a queue. This year I was in the middle of it. From outside, the machines look charmingly rustic, from the inside they are a job waiting to be done.

A large stainless steel tilting pan full of goulash, lid raised, in the field kitchen tent. A hand-written label on the neighboring unit reads "100 L".
One of the goulash machines mid-service, approx. 100 L and counting.

The vessels are enormous. The one next to my station was hand-labeled with a strip of masking tape reading ≈100 L. Initially that sounded like showing off, and later I understood it as a warning.

Washing a pot at that scale barely resembles washing a pot. There is no wrist action. There is no rinsing it under the tap while thinking about something else. You use a hose, a long scrubber and then get in it. You brace against the rim, you scrub with your shoulder and your back, the steam fogs your glasses the moment you lean in, so the first minute of every pot is scrubbed entirely on faith, then you rinse, you haul, and there is another one.

The motto of GPN24 was Gulasch at the Scale of Chaos. Nobody mentions that the washing-up scales accordingly.

I was winded. Properly, embarrassingly winded, after two hours of it.

The orange field kitchen unit with a wooden spoon resting in a steel insert of goulash, sponges and washing-up liquid on the surface.
The business end: a spoon the size of an oar.

Shift Two: The Schnippelschlacht

Entropia has a word for the vegetable prep session, and it is a magnificent word: Schnippelschlacht, "Chopping battle."

The troll page advertises it, entirely straight-faced, as the perfect job for trolls with a culinary disposition and a steady hand with a knife. In my case, that meant peppers, and lots of them.

A note for English readers, because this trips people up constantly: in German, Paprika is the vegetable. It's the bell pepper. The red powder you might be thinking of is Paprikapulver.

Somewhere around the fortieth pepper, the hands take over and the mind wanders off entirely. People pay good money for meditation retreats that deliver less.

The rest of the shift was salads, and running ingredients back and forth from storage, which, in a building like the ZKM, means real distance and slow elevators for heavy goods.

The thing that I've come to realize is how scale changes the activity. At home you chop three peppers and you're done. Here you chop peppers, and there are more peppers, and the peppers keep on coming, and at some point it stops being preparation at all. It becomes throughput.

I have launched websites with worse backpressure handling than the GPN kitchen.

Shift Three: The Trash Troll and the Ameise

My other troll type was bottles.

GPN was held at the start of June, so the weather was warm. This year's heatwave had not yet started but it was still warm enough that staying hydrated was important. So there are a lot of empty bottles of beverages like soda, beers and Club-Mate. Fifteen hundred people drinking things for four days and three nights produce a quantity of empty glass and plastic that has to be seen to be believed. The empty ones pile up at collection points scattered through the ZKM, the HfG, and the outdoor seating area, and the boxes fill faster than you think.

Somebody has to circle the venue and empty them. For a couple of hours, together with other folks, that somebody was me.

The tool for this job is a pallet and an Ameise.

"Ameise" is German for ant, and it is a pallet truck. Friedrich Jungheinrich registered Ameise for hand pallet trucks and transport carts on October 22, 1948, because, like the insect, the machine shifts many times its own weight without apparent effort.

So we took many loops with the Ameise. Crates of empties onto the pallet. Pallet onto the Ameise. Ameise through a media art museum full of hackers. Repeat. Round and round the ZKM, the HfG, and back out to the lawn. Then you sort out the different types of empties, and you repeat.

I feel obliged to point out that the GPN24 corporate parody, the megacorp that does everything, everywhere, around the clock, specifically advertised, among its many divisions, Gulaschpalettenfernverkehr. Goulash pallet long-distance freight.

It was good fun. And there is a sense of accomplishment. The collection point was full. Now it is empty. There is no sprint review. There are technically stakeholders (the motto made all fifteen hundred of us stakeholders of GPN24.de), but not one of them scheduled a call.

Donating Time and Money

Where does the ridiculous glow of pride come from? The results are visible, and the contribution is actually useful. So much of modern work (mine, probably yours too) disappears into abstractions: tickets, decks, quarters. Here, the pot is clean, the peppers are chopped, the bottles are gone, and people are eating. Cause, effect, dinner.

I mentioned respect earlier, and it isn't a throwaway line. I did six hours of the easiest version of this work, once, under ideal conditions, surrounded by cheerful people, with a blog post waiting at the end as my reward. The people who do it professionally do it all day, every day, at speed, in worse conditions, for less thanks, and nobody writes them up afterwards.

The same goes for the other trolls, and for the Entropia crew who do this every year. The scale of what gets accomplished purely through people volunteering their time is remarkable. Entry to GPN is effectively free. The event is carried by donations and by trolls. This year Entropia had to ask, quite pointedly, for €80,000 in donations to make GPN24 and future editions possible, after several years of failing to break even, with the event's existence at stake. The community hit the target, and GPN24 happened.

That is what all of this rests on: a bunch of individual people deciding, one shift at a time, to press the button.

My own contribution was tiny. Four hours in a kitchen and a few circuits with a pallet truck, against four days and fifteen hundred people. It rounds to nothing.

But that is the point. No single ant carries the anthill. The load only moves because it is distributed, and it is only distributed because somebody built a system that enables this, a system for converting goodwill into goulash.

And now, the main question remains: did I manage to eat any of the goulash this year? Nope, I still have not eaten the goulash.

I guess, the goulash and I have unfinished business.

Marin standing in front of the white market tents outside the ZKM on a bright June day, with GPN24 visitors browsing the stalls behind him.
Standing outside the GPN kitchen tent, looking worried.

If you are going to GPN25 in 2027 (and I am), do yourself a favor. Make an account at troll.gulas.ch before you arrive. Take one shift. Just one. Two hours of something you have never done.

You will meet people you would never have met at your own table. You will find out what the event is actually made of. And you will get to say, entirely truthfully, that you helped.

Gallery: GPN24 Impressions

Beyond the goulash tent, GPN24 was, as ever, a feast for the eyes. Here are some impressions from around the venue that capture the unique atmosphere of this hacker and artist gathering.

Hover mouse pointer over the slideshow to stop automatic progression.

Overhead view of the ZKM main hall at night, a lit-up CHAOS sign hanging over rows of tables.

The Hall After Dark

CHAOS lit up over rows of hackers who show no sign of calling it a night.

The ZKM building exterior with a golden sculpture and visitors on the plaza under a blue sky.

The Calm Side of the Building

The ZKM's glass facade, the sculpture wrapped in gold foil and all, on the quiet side of a very busy weekend.

The packed Medientheater auditorium during the GPN24 opening ceremony, a speaker at a podium in front of a large screen.

The Opening Ceremony

Moments before Entropia briefed fifteen hundred new stakeholders of GPN24.de.

A vintage terminal and keyboard set up on an orange table, surrounded by bottles and a hand-written note.

A Hacker's Desk

Vintage terminal, hand-labeled note, and the essential bottled water, between shifts.

A vintage Commodore Amiga computer with monitor and keyboard on display.

Wonderful, old Hardware

An Amiga 4000 with Lightwave.

The ZKM's permanent 'Inside the DataVault' exhibit, a large illuminated display panel.

Museum by Day, Congress by Night

The ZKM's own collection, on permanent display a few steps from the goulash tent.

A large sculpture spelling 'I love KA' on the plaza outside the ZKM.

I ♥ KA

Karlsruhe's landmark, just outside the ZKM doors.

A Note on the Visuals

As always at GPN, photos follow the event's rules: no participants' faces are recognizable in these shots except my own, which I inflict on you knowingly and with full consent.

Credits

Thanks to the entire GPN24 kitchen crew, who were patient with a novice who had clearly never held a pot that size, and to the Trolldesk, who never once made me feel like I was in the way. And to Entropia e.V., who do this every year, for free, because they believe it should exist.

Feedback at the Scale of Chaos: The Analog Synth Workshops at GPN24

June 2026