DebConf Organizers blog
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I’ve send a mail today with a summary of some of my experiences in Managua and tiny bits of Nicaragua late April / early May 2012. If you are considering going to DebConf12 (which you obviously should do as you are reading this!) go and read this mail, as it includes a thematically sorted list of impressions and advice written by Gunnar, Norman, Leo, Felix and myself, which should give you some better idea about DebConf12 in Managua!
While I spent 14 days in Nicaragua in total, for the last three days I was joined by Gunnar Wolf, to make sure my impressions about the local team, the status of the preparations and everything were correct. Our visit also seems to have been very motivating to local team members, whom I’ve seen really enthusiastic to welcome a huge Debian crowd for the first DebConf in Central America in just a few weeks!
At the last DebConf12 IRC meeting I summarized it like this: “in very short: my two weeks were great, I had a great vacation, met many members of the localteam, which is way bigger then it seems on irc, saw and liked UCA (Universidad Centroamericana, the DebConf12 venue), had zillions of reunions (meetings, see schedule wiki page) and met many nice people and a very hot & interesting country+capital with great countryside.”
The deadline for sponsored accomodation ends in three days - so if you haven’t registered yet, hurry up, DebCamp starts in 49 days! :-) (After that registration is still possible, but you will need to pay for your costs yourself.)
We’re looking forward to see you there and have a great DebConf together! Hopefully we sweat together while Wheezy is frozen :-D
DebConf12 is drawing closer and closer! Have you ever been to a DebConf? You will surely agree with us: It’s a life-changing event! It’s one of the greatest geek gatherings in the world! It’s something you can’t afford on missing out! It’s… wait..
Oh, sorry, I had my spam mode set to highest. But still, that does not make it any less true.
And one third of May has already passed. This means that the first deadlines are just around the corner: next Tuesday (15-may), sponsored registration will close, so make sure to register before it’s too late.
Right, that’s not the point of my post, I wandered off again. I’m sorry, I just visited Managua last weekend (Holger will soon tell you about our visit), and it’s impossible to keep the mind off the excitement. I wanted to ask you to share your greatest, latest ideas or projects.
DebConf is about many things — But one of its most important features is its rich set of talks, usually with very high and interesting contents in the technical, social, organizational levels — Or several of them at once.
As always, you will be able to submit talks until a day before you present it. However, it’s best for your intended audience to know bits about your proposed topic, possibly even to share some information beforehand, so that the exposition can be as smooth as possible and the interaction during the talk even more — And this is specially true for BoF sessions.
However, we do have one advertised deadline: Talks submitted up to June 1st will be considered to be pre-scheduled. This means, to be part of the officially announced program, and have guaranteed coverage of our (always great) video team.
But maybe you don’t feel comfortable presenting a topic. Or you are, but you think it would be important to have several thematically related talks be grouped together.
And if you are interested in this group of talks, you will probably know who would be more interesting to invite to present the topics - And will be able to prod them to do so.
You can request to coordinate a track. That will ensure you get a contiguous block of timeslots for the talks you schedule, and do a great contribution to DebConf.
To add your track, please mail talks@debconf.org. Please, specially if you do so in the few days following May 9, send me a copy to gwolf@gwolf.org, as it seems the alias is not yet set up.
This year, we will have a high number of very motivated attendees from the many countries in the Central American region who want to get started in helping Debian, but have not yet found how to do it. Usually we would see local communities as prime material for DebianDay – However, many of them are more interested in getting hands-on tutorials and be mentored into contributing to Debian.
So, if you are part of a team working on a given aspect of Debian, or want to get people involved into your project, register it in the Tutorials and mentoring track.
See you all soon, very soon, in tropical Managua for the hottest DebConf ever!
(oh — For those who remember days long past in Helsinki: There is even a sauna! ;-) And it’s GREAT)
The Debian Project is pleased to announce that registration is now open for DebConf12, which will take place in Managua, Nicaragua, from Sunday 8 July to Saturday 14 July 2012. The conference will be preceded as usual by one week of DebCamp, from Sunday 1 July to Saturday 7 July.
As previous years, three different registration options will be available: Sponsored, Professional and Corporate. Through the Sponsored category, the Debian Project intend to help some people attend who would not be able to pay for their own travel to DebConf. The Corporate category, with a USD 1300 (EUR 1000) registration fee is intended for those attending DebConf as representatives of companies. The Professional category, with a USD 650 (EUR 500) registration fee, is intended for any individual or company who wants to help the conference by paying the direct costs of their attendence.
It will only be possible to apply for food and accommodation grants and/or travel grants until 15 May. For more detailed information about how to register, please see the separate announcement from the DebConf team.
Debian invites submissions of proposals for papers, presentations, discussion sessions and tutorials for its DebConf12 conference. Submissions are not limited to raditional talks: you could propose a performance, art installation, debate, or anything else. Official submissions will be accepted until 1 June 2012, 23:59 UTC.
This year, we will continue to organize some talks into thematic tracks. If you have a proposal for a DebConf track, please contact <debconf-team@lists.debconf.org>. Previous examples included Debian Science, Debian Infrastructure, and Community Outreach tracks. If you would like to be a track coordinator, please volunteer on that list. Detailed information on how to submit an event are available on the mail from the DebConf team.
The DebConf team just sent out a press release announcing the dates for DebConf12 in Nicaragua.
We hope to see many of you there!
The Debian Project’s annual conference is slowly coming closer. Visiting places around the world since 2000, DebConf will take place this year in Managua, Nicaragua, in July and will again provide an opportunity for people who contribute to Debian to meet in person for face-to-face collaboration and discussions.
At DebConf we try to bring together as many Debian contributors as possible, including those who could not afford to attend from their own resources. You can help make DebConf12 a success by your organisation becoming a sponsor, or by donating money as an individual.
Individual donations can be made online in either US dollars or euros.
If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, you can find more information about DebConf12 sponsor page or directly contact <sponsors@debconf.org>.
In addition to monetary donations, sponsorship can be provided in the form of in-kind donations, or by lending equipment for the conference period.
After using our small pre-website for some time now, we are very happy to announce the official website has gone live:
http://debconf12.debconf.orgNow it is the right time for you to get involved supporting the event or just enjoy the design and help us to spread the new website, f.e. by using our nice banners in the artwork section. Please stay tuned: Registration is going to be opened soon.
The headline is not entirely correct, there are still a very few recordings missing but the awesome videoteam (/me bowes) has already relased 75 low and 64 high quality encodings! Missing stuff will be added when it’s ready.
As usual you can get them all from the Debian videoteam archive. All available recordings are also linked from the DebConf11 schedule. For the first time we licenced our work under CC-BY 3.0.
Please leave a comment on wiki/DebConf11/Videoteam/Thanks.
Personally I’d like to deeply thank everybody who made DebConf11 a success! I’m proud to be part of a great and diverse community working on achieving their one common goal: to create the best free operating system! Have fun on the way!
If you would like to contribute to a session while watching the live
stream, please join the respective IRC channels. These are:
#debconf-auditorium and #debconf-roundroom on irc.debian.org. The
Web 2.0 thingy
at http://debconf11.debconf.org/watch.xhtml
will be updated soonish.
Sorry for the late notification about the video streams. We’ve been rather busy down here. However, DebianDay is about to start, and it looks, like it will turn out to be a great event!
The Video Setup is finished, too. The easiest way to watch the streams and
to participate via irc is by using the Web 2.0
thingy at http://debconf11.debconf.org/watch.xhtml.
You can also point your preferred video player at http://video.debconf.org:8000/Roundroom.ogv for the smaller round room, or http://video.debconf.org:8000/Auditorium.ogv for the larger auditorium, where DebianDay will take place.
The full schedule for the entire conference is available at http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/index.en.html. As usual we’ll make the videos available for download later.
This Thursday we’ll be running a special IRC session, “Behind the scenes with the DebConf team”.
Details:
This is an open session aimed at anyone who would like to find out more about how DebConf is organised. Of course, we’d love you to get involved in organising it yourself, by helping out at DebConf11 or helping plan future DebConfs, but it’s also fine to attend the session just because you are curious!
We are happy to announce that the preliminary schedule for the upcoming DebConf11 is available! As usual, it is still possible that more changes will occur, though we don’t expect anything major.
DebConf11 talks will mostly happen in two rooms simultaneously, except for a few plenaries which will be presented in the main room with no parallel event. We’ve tried to cluster related talks/BoFs in sequence, even though it was not always possible. Besides that there will be tracks covering specific topics, which are:
As in previous years, we provide many ways to access the schedule:
— the DebConf team
Today we had our long-awaited Travel Sponsorship team meeting. It took a little more than 90 minutes but had us check the ratings we did in the past days, discuss various of the people and aspects of our decisions, and then finally we decided on the cutoff levels for this year.
Actually an easy step (in theory) cutoff levels, it is always hard. On the one side there are the beancounters and the team working each year to find money for the conference. Doing whatever it takes to have our sponsors happy. Who, of course, can not give us unlimited amounts of money.
On the other hand there are all the (possible) attendees. Many of which can not afford the travel if we do not help them.
Getting both sides happy is near to impossible. We had about 100 people asking for nearly 60’000 Euros. On the other hand we had 35’000 Euro to give out. Doesn’t match, and getting another 25’000 Euro just so is not very likely to happen. Which lead to a “Sorry, no money this year” for 29 people.
We currently have 12 people still waiting for money. They got a “maybe, if someone cancels or we are lucky to get another sponsor” mail, and we hope we can help them, but we are not sure. We are waiting for another 7800 Euros here.
But the nice and shiny side of this all is: We have 56 people who we agreed to sponsor travel for, in total 35’000 Euros.
As usual many people requested travel sponsorship to attend DebConf 11 and are now waiting eagerly on the outcome of their request. We are sorry, that we can’t give you much details yet. To give you an idea of the time line, here is a small explanation of the process.
About 100 people requested travel sponsorship. In total that would about 50’000 Euro. Problem is currently we don’t exactly know, how much money we may spend on travel sponsorship ourselves (By the way: If a potential sponsor is reading this, please contact us; DebConf also accepts donations).
So, we formed a team
of 13 persons (the mail only lists twelve, one
was added later). The team members will start to rate
each and every
single request in two criteria: Contributor Level
and sponsorship
amount
. With limited amounts we obviously want to sponsor those first, who
contribute a lot to Debian, preferably if they don’t travel first class.
After that’s done, we’ll have a long, but ordered list, but the team still needs to meet and discuss different cases and similar. Our team isn’t really small and consists of people living all over the world, it’s quite hard to actually schedule a meeting everyone can attend. (Which is not a bug, but a feature: More people from more countries should in the end result in a fair rating of the sponsorship requests.)
So, in the end, we’ll meet on 19th of June. Sounds late, please keep in mind, that every team member has to rate all sponsorship requests (including some research) and all of them are volunteers with actual daytime jobs.
But even if you don’t hear anything from us short after that date, don’t panic! As said we really don’t know, yet, how much money we can spend on travel sponsorship. Our sponsor-hunting-team is constantly working on the acquisition of more money, so every now and then the budget for travel sponsorship gets increased, meaning that we can mail a couple of more people on our ordered list. So it might take a while, till we get to all, but we try very hard to do so.
As previously announced in Ganneff’s blog and Debian News, a special funding for DebConf11 is available for Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers who have either never attended a DebConf before, or who have not been to a DebConf since DebConf7 (in Scotland).
Email the DebConf Newbies Team (newbies@debconf.org) providing the following information:
— the DebConf team
The deadline for sponsored registration for DebConf11 in Banja Luka, originally May 8th, has officially been extended to May 19th. The reasons for the extension are as follows:
Thanks to a significant increase in sponsorship from one of our main sponsors, we have been permitted and encouraged to welcome more people to the conference. The extension is a one-off occurrence in response to this new development, and to allow any potential attendees time to access more information before registering.
Registration is required for everybody who plans to attend any part of Debconf. Access to the conference venue, food and accommodation is controlled through the registration badge. The only exception to the registration requirement is for those who plan to only attend Debian Day.
It is possible to request sponsorship for food, accommodation, and travel. Those who have been involved or contributed to Debian or to other open source projects are eligible to apply for sponsorship, which will be decided on a case-by-case basis.
The professional and corporate categories are for those who are sent and sponsored by their companies. Professional registration covers the actual costs of conference attendance, while corporate registration is just over double that price, and is aimed at those who, besides paying the actual costs, also want to contribute money and help Debian.
— the DebConf team