As many of you know, our project holds hackathons and mini-hackathons
on a regular basis. These are private invitation-only events where
our developers get together to work on ideas and code.
http://www.openbsd.org/hackathons.html
This mail concerns the mini-hackathons -- these are subject-area
specific events, for instance the network, ports, or filesystem
hackathons. They have around 10-16 developers.
I start planning these well in advance. We need to make sure we have
the critical people in the sub-group available -- it takes quite a
while to lock down the commitments from everyone. Simultaneously, we
are deciding on a time and place which has the right resources and
setup for our needs.
Almost always this comes down to:
roughly 24-hour-access secure hacking room under our control
good net (.EDU routing is strongly preferred)
fairly inexpensive accomodation very close to the hack room
Not in the US (or other countries with visa problems)
desireable for the developers to go there anyways, for tourism
and of course
A man-on-the-ground who understands what we need, and ensures
that the local details are not going to fall apart on us -- it
would be a shame for 15 people to fly to one location and find
out the hackroom is no longer available to us...
We don't use hotels or conference centers or such, of course. In the
past we've used two locations in remote old hotels in Japan, a town
office in Iceland, an ISP meeting room in Hungary, a research council
meeting room in Australia -- as well as campus facilities in Sweden,
Portugal, Austria, etc. You get the idea. Typically it is either a
super cheap hotel with good net, or a super cheap hotel near some
meeting room we get for free, or a campus + nice dorms during the
off-season.
At the moment I am finding myself a bit low on options for late 2011
or all of 2012 (I don't know any specific dates yet; picking dates is
hard, but once I have options for locations, I can talk to developers
and pick dates). One more note -- I fear that mini-hackathons these
days must be in quite exotic places because some developers have
really started to enjoy doing extra stuff after a hackathon. Certain
developers (it is not just me) are unable to resist a good network
mini-hackathon in a mountainous place, and the result is good code.
So I've decided to ask around on tech@ to see if there is anyone who
has an excellent potential location.
There are other requirements I am also on the lookout for, but in the
meantime I would like to get _private mails_ from people who have
potential thoughts about this.
At worst I can bank the offers for future years. Thanks.
