Event Kit
Zine Making

Zines are small, self-published and often photocopied collections of texts and images in a handy magazine format. Zine making has a long tradition and can be a fun activity for your workshop, and great to collaborate and engage with technical topics in a creative way.

This kit includes tips and ideas for incorporating physical or digital zine making into your LAN Party, as well as inspiration and resources to get you started. You can focus your party entirely on creating a zine, or develop it alongside your workshop to document ideas and results.

Inspiration

spaCy 101 Zine

An illustrated introduction to the spaCy NLP library. Use the code FEMINISTAI at checkout for 20% off your order.

WizardZines

BubbleSort Zines

Playful and cute zines by Amy Wibowo with a mission to empower women, girls and nonbinary folks in tech.

Round Robin

Beautifully illustrated educational books on technical topics, including an intro to Apache Kafka with otters.

Ideas

Zines don’t have to use pen and paper. You don’t need to be good at drawing to get involved! Instead, you can make a digital zine and use photos, illustrations or fonts. You can also choose a more text-heavy approach.
You don’t need to illustrate from scratch. There are many free resources for design assets you can use and combine. Instead of working with graphics, you can also focus on colors and fonts. (Don’t forget to check the licenses and credit the creators! Your zine could include a page for that at the end.)
Collect old magazines, newspapers and stickers. This is the oldschool way of collage making and a lot of fun! It’s also a great way to use any tech stickers you might have lying around. Don’t forget to provide scissors, glue and paper for the participants.
Find out everyone’s skills and work together. During introduction, ask participants to share their skills and interests. Maybe one person loves drawing, while someone else has experience in photo editing or writing. Combine your skills, divide up the tasks and work on the pages together.
Approach it like making slides for a talk or presentation. If you have experience with public speaking, think of a zine spread like a slide. Break down the content into small pieces and illustrate it as needed. This guide can help if you’re a beginner.
Print a zine with contributions by each participant. Everyone gets to create a spread on a given topic that’s combined later on by the host and printed for everyone to keep. You can split the printing costs if needed. Contributions can be digital or scans of pages. Don’t forget to use a spread template to ensure each contribution has the correct dimensions.
Photocopy! If professional printing is inconvenient, there’s always the traditional way: print everyone’s contributions, photocopy them and staple your zines together. Ideally, your event location has a copy machine available. If not, check if there’s a copy shop near you. Make sure to align the pages accordingly so the spreads can be stapled in the middle.
Upload and share your zine with the world. Speakerdeck and Issuu are great for creating digital flipbooks.

Choosing a topic

Use the topic of your LAN Party. For example, if you’re working on hacking LLMs, make this the topic of your zine and include texts explaining the concepts and corresponding illustrations. You can also use the zine to document the work and results of your experiments during the LAN Party.
Zine-ify the documentation of your favourite tool or library. Zines can help make technical content more fun and accessible. Using existing documentation also gives you plenty of content to work with – see the spaCy 101 zine for an example.
Make a conference zine. If your party is part of or hosted alongside a conference like PyCon, dedicate your zine to the conference topics and presentations. Participants can cover their favorite talks, summarize the main takeaways and what they’ve learned, or profile the speaker. You can also include photos of the speakers or interesting slides, either printed or digital.
Explore a technical topic from a feminist angle. It’s a Feminist AI LAN Party after all! Choose a broader topic, dive deeper into relevant literature and include interesting ideas you come across. If you’re working on AI, bias and ethics is a great topic to start with. You can also include short essays, examples or even just thought-provoking questions.
Focus on what you’re passionate about. Instead of picking an overall topic, ask participants to create content on whatever they’re passionate about or working on at the moment. This can be their day-to-day work, hobbies, interesting technologies or anything else.