Hi Daniel, Thanks for taking care of this.
Le mardi 30 septembre 2025, 12:14:04 heure d’été d’Europe centrale Daniel Gultsch a écrit : > Hi all, > > We have a date for FOSDEM 2026: January 31st to February 1st > > This means we also have a date for Summit 28: January 29th - January 30th > > As the person who has (co)organized the last two summits I would like > to start a discussion on the next summit by asking a few questions and > floating some ideas. > > • How did you like the format of the last three summits? (Renting a > conference room in a hotel with lunch provided (in buffet style) by > the hotel) The organization was good and the event nice. But Thon EU is really a luxury option in my opinion, and I would be fine with something less fancy. > • Do we want a 1 day or 2 day summit? Last year the 'official' part of > the summit was over after 1.2 days and had we known this we could have > probably managed to squeeze it all into one day. One day feels too short to me. If the discussions end before the end of day two, I think we should take the opportunity of having so many XMPP people at the same location to work in groups of interests, as we have done in the past, or to do a hackathon like we have done another year. Sometimes discussions don't lead to concrete specs or code, so doing a draft implementation while the discussion is still fresh in one’s mind sounds like a good option. Last year I had to leave early to prepare FOSDEM, but I would definitely have stayed the whole day if I could, and would have loved some form of hackathon. Also, some hard-to-implement things like moving to OMEMO:2 would be easier with some of the best specialists present in the room. > • If we do a repeat of the last two (three) years (which i feel is > somewhat likely due to how difficult it is to find places that would > have us for free and because I’m under the impression that people like > the "fancy environment" with the snacks and the fancy bottles of > water) While I appreciate the good lunch we've had, I, for one, don't really care about a fancy location. What's important to me is being with other XMPP people. > I feel somewhat strongly that we should switch to a model in > which every participant pays for their own seat (at per cost) and add > a fairly generous fee-waiver on top of it. > I’m very much in favor of keeping the Summit accessible. > (Socio)economicly speaking our community is very diverse. We have > people in our community who would not be able to come if they had to > pay the ~250 Euro the hotel charges us per person. But we also have > people in our community to whom this is a rounding error in the > overall travel+accommodation cost. (I have personally been on both > sides of this.) Honestly, I clearly couldn’t come with such a fee to pay. It's already really costly for me in terms of money and time (I’ve had a full day of traveling to come, and the same of course to return). I would rather not have the XSF dinner or eat cheap pizza than have to pay to attend the summit. And even if I were eligible, I wouldn’t be happy with a fee-waiver, as other people would need it more than me, and I would find it unfair. Note that I’m not sure that I’ll come this year anyway, it’s a general answer. > The XSF notoriously doesn’t have a lot of money and efforts to change > this over the last 3 years haven’t been very successful. Switching to > a fee waiver model would allow board (or whoever) to set aside a fixed > amount and send x (where x=10 for example) applicants to the summit > for free. It's totally understandable that XSF has difficulties handling that. I'm wondering what others have to say about your suggestion, or if it's possible to find a cheaper location, and if not, how much it would actually cost per person in the end. Again, I'm not even sure to come this year, so it's just an opinion at this point. > cheers > Daniel Best, Goffi
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
