[REQUEST FOR COMMUNITY FEEDBACK] Re: X at FrOSCon 2006

[Egbert Eich]

Sebastian -

This is really a great thing. 

We are seeing a growing number of events which would be worthwhile
places for X.Org to go. Especially here in Europe I see more and
more opportunities (including events where we have the opportunity
to meet with a lot of developers of other projects).
With travelling expenses considerably low (train fare to get around
Central Europe is more or less affordable) it would be possible to 
organize several HotHouses and small conferences like Luc is 
currently setting up for FOSDEM.  
	       http://wiki.x.org/wiki/fosdem2006
HotHouses have proven to be extremely valuable as developers have
the chance to meet face2face and hack together. In the distant
past (before the stock market rally came to a grinding halt) XFree86
had organized two of those events. At that time money was no issue
(after all there was a lot of capital investors money to spend)
therefore it was easy to rent a location find organizers and set 
up such an event.
What is only needed for such an event is 
- a location that is reasonably easy to get to
- an inexpensive site
- affordable accomodation for the participants
- a group that does the local organization
  If it can be connected with another event (like FOSDEM or FrOSCon)
  a lot of the infrastructure can be shared and people are there who
  can do the local organization.
Lacking many of these features no HotHouse event has taken place
since.
Now there seems to be hope as we see more and more opportunities 
popping up.
X.Org even has some funding to support organizing these meetings 
and could also to help participants on their travel expenses.

I don't expect that we can have a big international meeting every 
two or three months. However we ought to explore the opportunity 
to hold those meetings on a more local level and giving people from 
the area - however you want to define this ;-) - the opportunity 
to get and work together.

Still we need to see how much interest there is among the people
from our community (especially those located here in Europe) to
participate in such events.
Right now I see the majority of X developers located in North America 
(or is moving there :-/ ).

I would like to use this opportunity to collect ideas and feedback 
on this from our community.

Cheers,
	Egbert.



Sebastian Bergmann writes:
 >  Hello,
 > 
 >  I am in the organizing team for a new Free Software / Open Source
 >  conference in Germany that will be held in Sankt Augustin (near Bonn
 >  and Cologne), Germany next June. The conecpt for the conference is a
 >  mix of FOSDEM and LinuxTag. We expect about 1.000 visitors during the
 >  two days.
 > 
 >  We offer FS/OSS projects rooms with internet access and presentation
 >  equipment for hacking and/or organizing their own sub-conference. Would
 >  the X developers be interested in this?
 > 
 >  Cheers,
 > Sebastian
 > 
 > -- 
 > Sebastian Bergmann                      http://www.sebastian-bergmann.de/
 > GnuPG Key: 0xB85B5D69 / 27A7 2B14 09E4 98CD 6277 0E5B 6867 C514 B85B 5D69
 > 
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