The DebConf team is pleased to announce the release of the DebConf13 Final Report. It’s a 32-page document which gives the reader an idea about the conference as a whole. It includes words from the Debian Project Leader, descriptions of talks, a section about the Debian Birthday Party, attendee impressions, budgeting and DebConf13 in numbers. If you attended Debconf13, the report may refresh some of your memories and bring you closer to the organization team work. If not, it will certainly encourage you to be part of future Debian events.

We thank the Matanel foundation, Google, the Republic and Canton of Neuchâtel, and all other DebConf13 sponsors for their support that made the event possible.

The DebConf team

After two incredible weeks here in Vaumarcus, the awesome team of DebConf volunteers and organizers is getting his latest lunch from Le Camp after having spent the morning tyding the venue.

This DebConf made more than hundred scheduled hours of talks, BoFs and meetings possible and brought more than 300 attendees together from all around the world. Live video coverage for two talk rooms during six days, eight kilograms of powder sugar for the Debian Birthday cake icing and thousands of smiling faces made this DebConf the awesome week it’s been.

The view is really fantastic from here! Thanks for all the fish!

We look forward to meeting everyone in 2014 at the next DebConf in Portland!

The DebConf team

This is just a quick update about the video streams of DebConf13 which are available at the following URLs:

• Main talk room, chat on #debconf-talkroom1 on irc.debian.org
• Second talk room, #debconf-talkroom2
• hires streams, with special thanks to Sesse and pkern
• video recordings - already has files up to yesterday!

/me bows to this is pretty fantatic results - and, the view is also fantastic! Especially from down at the lake :-)
P.S.: I’ve you missed some technical details in the systemd talk from Lennart, these are probably in here.

This is just a quick note that the video streams of DebConf13 will be available at the following URLs:

• Main talk room, chat on #debconf-talkroom1 on irc.debian.org
• Second talk room, guess what - #debconf-talkroom2 it is.

May you have a productive and joyful DebConf - and thanks for volunteering + talking if you do so! DebConf is what you make it.

We are happy to announce that the schedule for the upcoming DebConf13 in Vaumarcus, Switzerland, is available! It is still possible for some changes to occur, as we always try to accept new proposals, even those submitted during the conference.

DebConf13 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. A third room will be available for discussion groups and ad-hoc sessions. As usual, we’ve tried to cluster related activities in sequence, even though it was not always possible. Besides that there will be many tracks covering specific topics, which are:

• Debian for the cloud
• Building and porting
• Community outreach
• Real time communications
• Debian blends and derivatives
• Quality assurance
• Debian boot
• Debian in education
• Debian teams

There will also be two special tracks, since DebConf is not only about hacking, talks and discussions:

• Social activities, which includes a poetry night, the traditional cheese and wine party, our group photo, a day trip, the conference dinner etc.
• Debian 20^th birthday, an event open to the general public to celebrate Debian’s 20^th birthday (details to come soon!).

As in previous years, we provide various ways to access the schedule:

• Plain nice html export, available for everyone without needing a login.
• The same as above, for people registered in our “Pentabarf” conference management system: This one has one extra feature compared to the non-login version: You can rate an event and its speaker(s) after you attended it. Please take the opportunity to do so, your feedback is very important both for the speaker(s) and for the organizing team!
• An iCal file
• An xCal file
• An XML file

— the DebConf team

DebConf13 DebCamp confirmed!

The DebConf Team is very pleased to announce that DebCamp will be open for almost a full week in August. DebCamp will start on Tuesday 6 August 2013 at the main conference venue, Le Camp, and will be immediately followed by DebConf13, starting Sunday 11th August.

Opening of the reconfirmation period

As the DebConf Registration Team have announced on debconf-announce (to which you should really be subscribed), now is the time to reconfirm your attendance to DebConf13 (and actually register to DebCamp). This is really important for final calculations of food, room and costs, please read the announcement for all the important details. The reconfirmation period is open until the 30 June 2013.

We look forward to seeing everyone in August in Vaumarcus.

The DebConf team

Dear all,

DebConf13 sponsorship application date extended

As communicated through the debconf-announce@lists.debconf.org mailing list, the deadline to apply for DebConf13 sponsorship has been extended to the end of this week, May 19th.

If you intend to attend DebConf13 in August and would like to apply for sponsored registration, now is the time to register in Penta! After this deadline you will no longer be able to apply for sponsored food, accomodation or travel. Please refer to the announcement and to the registration documentation for details. Please contact us on the debconf-discuss mailing list if you have any questions.

DebConf12 final report

The DebConf team is also happy to announce the release of the DebConf12 Final Report. It’s a 39-page document which gives the reader an idea about the conference as a whole. It includes descriptions of talks, DebCamp and Debian Day activities, personal impressions, attendee and budgeting numbers, the work of various teams, social events and so on. If you attended Debconf12, the report may refresh some of your memories and bring you closer to the organization team work. If not, it will certainly encourage you to be part of future Debian events.

We thank the Universidad Centroamericana, the Government of Nicaragua, Google and all other DebConf12 sponsors for their support that made the event possible.

The DebConf team

Dear all,

Registration is now open for DebConf13, which will take place in Le Camp near Vaumarcus, Switzerland, from Sunday 11 August to Saturday 17 August 2013. The registration deadline for those who wish to make sponsorship applications is Wednesday 15 May 2013. After this date, you can still register, but you will need to pay for accommodation and food.

Registration

If you want to attend DebConf13, go to the Registration page and follow the procedure outlined there. Please even read the website page if you attended previous conferences, because it explains some important changes with respect to previous years.

DebCamp

We are planning to prepend the current DebConf week with additional DebCamp days, but we need some more time to sort out the details. We also need more money to be able to fully sponsor DebCamp for everyone or to extend it to more than a few days. If you would like this to happen, please contact us and help find additional sponsorship. We will send another announcement about DebCamp as soon as registration for DebCamp opens.

Thank you

DebConf13 thanks its two platinum sponsors, Google and the Matanel Foundation, as well as all other sponsors.

We look forward to welcoming you to Le Camp in August!

The DebConf team

The DebConf13 matching fund announced previously is now complete. The matching sponsor, Brandorr Group will match the collected amount of 2513 USD, resulting in 5026 USD of sponsoring money for DebConf13, for the benefit of all attendees.

Despite raising only slightly more than half of the expected money, this first experience of raising funds through this matching fund mechanism can be considered successful.

DebConf is very important to the health of Debian, and Debian is very important to our team, so we’re doing what we can to help. In this case we really wanted to see if we could provide an incentive for individual users of Debian to donate to the project. It seems like it worked well, and we’d love to do something like this again in the future.

Brian Gupta, Brandorr Group

DebConf13 continues to welcome donations from individuals and is also seeking further sponsors.

Registration opening

Registration for DebConf13 will be opening shortly: stay tuned!

We look forward to welcoming you to Vaumarcus!

As part of the DebConf13 fundraising effort, a generous sponsor, Brandorr Group, has proposed to start a matching fund in USD for DebConf13; in place through the end of April 30th. The rules are quite simple:

• for each dollar donated by an individual to DebConf13 through the mechanism, Brandorr Group will donate another dollar;
• individual donations will be matched only up to 100 USD each;
• only donations in USD will be matched;
• Brandorr Group will match the donated funds up to a maximum total of 5 000 USD;
• this generous offer will only stay in place through the end of April 30th, please act quickly, and help spread the word!

For details, please see our Monetary support from individuals page, which also has a short url, for convenience: http://deb.li/dc13donate.

Help welcome

As always, the DebConf team is looking for volunteers. Some jobs need technical skills, but many DebConf tasks are about working to deadlines on non-technical issues (e.g. fundraising, budgeting, talk scheduling). You can see more information about some of the jobs to be done on the DebConf wiki.

Please do think about getting involved and sharing your ideas with us, to help us make DebConf an even more useful event for Debian in the future.

We look forward to welcoming you to Vaumarcus!

This post is a quick status update on DebConf13, for those who aren’t following the debconf-team mailing list.

As you may know, this year’s DebConf will be held at Le Camp, in Vaumarcus, Switzerland.  Our concept for this DebConf is to hold it in a natural environment, away from distractions. We hope you will enjoy spending time together with other Debian collaborators in this beautiful part of Switzerland, on the shore of Lake Neuchâtel.

Dates

DebConf13 will take place from Sunday 11. August 2013 to Sunday 18. August 2013. (We will use Saturday 10. August 2013 to prepare the venue for the conference.)

You may notice that the dates don’t cover two weeks like in the last few years (there is no separate DebCamp week). For budget reasons, current plans are to merge the two weeks’ activities  into an 8 day period. If you think that’s a pity, it’s not too late to change it — just join the fundraising team and start working quickly!

Travel

If you want to start arranging your travel to attend DebConf, some initial travel suggestions may be useful:

• We recommend that people from nearby countries take advantage of the excellent train connections to Switzerland, rather than looking for flights: the Swiss Federal Railways website, provides a very helpful international travel planner which knows about trains, but also about the local bus connections you will need to reach the DebConf venue.
• The best railway station to aim for is Yverdon-les-Bains. To get to the venue from there, take a local bus to the bus stop called “Concise, Camp de Vaumarcus”, which is very close to the venue. You can also directly use that name as your final destination in the above travel planner.
• Nearby airports include Geneva -  GVA (1h30 from the venue by train), Zurich - ZRH (3h from the venue by train) and Basel-Mulhouse - BSL (3h from the venue by train).

The DebConf13 map shows the venue and the bus line (with some stops).

Registration

We expect to open registration around the start of March. Currently we are still evaluating some possible new conference management systems, which we hope might avoid the frustrations some attendees have had in the past with Pentabarf.

Help welcome

As always, the DebConf team is looking for volunteers. Some jobs need technical skills (e.g. testing conference management system setups, working on the website), but many DebConf tasks are about working to deadlines on non-technical issues (e.g. fundraising, budgeting, talk scheduling). You can see more information about some of the jobs to be done on the  DebConf wiki.

Please do think about getting involved and sharing your ideas with us, to help us make DebConf an even more useful event for Debian in the future.

We look forward to welcoming you to Vaumarcus!