[[e-mail]: FOSDEM 2010: Distribution Miniconf]

[Wouter Verhelst]

Hi all,

I've received this mail from the FOSDEM organizers.

Executive summary: there will not be a Developers' Room for Debian at
the next FOSDEM (nor for any other distribution, for that matter), but
instead there'll be a "distribution miniconf" that we'll be able to
participate in. They still need to flesh out the details on that one,
though, and input is requested.

Please read below for the details.

----- Forwarded message from Pascal Bleser <loki@...> -----

Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:05:58 +0200
From: Pascal Bleser <loki@...>
To: Jono Bacon <jono@...>, Henne Vogelsang <hvogel@...>,
        Joe Brockmeier <zonker@...>,
        Max Spevack <mspevack@...>,
        "Paul W. Frields" <pfrields@...>,
        Frederic Hornain <fhornain@...>,
        Fabian Arrotin <arrfab@...>,
        Tobias Scherbaum <dertobi123@...>,
        Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@...>,
        Christina Fullam <musikc@...>,
        Wouter Verhelst <wouter@...>,
        Holger Levsen <holger@...>,
        Martin Michlmayer <tbm@...>,
        Anne Nicolas <anne.nicolas@...>
CC: FOSDEM DevRooms <devrooms@...>,
        FIT - FOSDEM Information Team <fit@...>
Subject: FOSDEM 2010: Distribution Miniconf
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Hi all

If you wonder why you receive this email, it's either because you've
been a contact for your respective distribution at FOSDEM in the past,
or because I'm looking for contacts with distribution projects where we
didn't have any in the past ;)

If this email is best sent to another person, please forward it accordingly.

You probably all heard of FOSDEM before. If not, FOSDEM ==
http://fosdem.org ;)

The next edition is 6+7 February 2010, and it's also our 10th edition.
As such, we've been reflecting on the evolution of the event (in the
sense that our mission and what it has become is rather a platform for
FOSS projects, much more than just a conference, or at least that's what
we'd like FOSDEM to become), and we are introducing a change regarding
Developer Rooms for distribution projects.

We would like to push the envelope of our mission even further by
organizing something along the lines of a "distribution summit" during
FOSDEM 2010 (incidentally, I had that idea long before I heard of the
"distrosummit" that will be held at linuxconf.au, a few weeks before
FOSDEM but hey, it's far away, and FOSDEM is the European event of the
year ;D).

The idea is that rather than having several distributions with their own
respective and individual Developer Room, we will host mixed conference
rooms where talks and sessions will be organized _by topic_, with
contributors from all distributions attending and participating.

The reasoning behind it is manifold:

* most distributions have their own events nowadays (FUDcon, debconf,
openSUSE conf, EuroBSDCon, etc...), which are already used for topics
and matters that are specific to each of them

* FOSDEM is an almost unique occasion to meet and exchange with
contributors of many major FOSS projects, given the large amount of
visitors (~5000) and projects present during the weekend — we believe
that not taking profit of that constellation is a bad use of the tool
that is FOSDEM :)

* the number of distributions requesting Developer Rooms at FOSDEM is
very likely to rise in the future, given that Gentoo didn't send a
request in time last edition and that Ubuntu didn't ask until now (but
I'm assuming that it is likely to happen at some point in time ;)), as
well as Mandriva having unfortunately been turned down by us due to lack
of space (and there's really no reason to accept the usual suspects and
having to say no to Mandriva, or almost any other distribution project
for that matter)

To dive into a little more detail:

* 3 (large) rooms will be allocated for that "distro summit"
* sessions will be scheduled by topic (see below)
* every project is welcome to join in :)

Note that stands are not affected in any way and will be handled as
previous editions (i.e. send us a request:
http://fosdem.org/2010/call_for_stands)

Topics are something I need your feedback and ideas on: whatever you
think is appropriate as a topic that is recurring issue for
distributions (governance, feature tracking, trust mechanisms,
ambassadors, ...), or something where you would like to present your
solutions for specific tasks to other distributions (e.g. package
building, translations, bug tracking, community infrastructure, ...),
especially if you're interested in feedback, ideas and collaboration
from and with other projects... we'd love to hear about it :)

Given that, when I'm switching caps, I'm myself deeply involved into a
distribution project (openSUSE), I do have a few proposals in terms of
topics — and please don't shoot if most examples I'm giving are related
to openSUSE, it's just because it happens to be the distribution project
I know best:

* Packaging:
~~~~~~~~~~~~
- - present different toolsets for handling the burden of packaging a
distribution as well as additional repositories (e.g. openSUSE Build
Service)
- - have a few packaging subsystem sessions, where the current state of
RPM/yum/zypp/..., dpkg/apt, emerge, ports, etc... are presented, as well
as their respective roadmaps for the future
- - evolve/adapt repository metadata formats ?

* Localization:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- - how to handle collaborative translations ? (e.g. transifex)
- - localization of distribution documentation, project wikis, etc...
- - how to coordinate with upstream ?

* Community Infrastructure:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- - FedoraCommunity, opensourced LaunchPad, Bugzilla extensions, etc...

* Test and QA
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* Governance:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- - boards, elections, technical control of the distribution, ...
- - ambassador programs, LoCo teams, etc...
- - legal issues

* Working with upstream:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- - have a few sessions with major upstream projects present at FOSDEM
(Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, ...) on how to improve/optimize collaboration
between downstream (distributions) and upstream (developers), e.g. for
patches


Unless somebody has some time to spare and steps up, which would be more
than welcome, we will take care of handling the coordination of the
session proposals, as well as the schedule.

If you're interested in participating, please contact us ASAP at
devrooms@...
The most practical option will be to subscribe to a mailing-list:
http://lists.fosdem.org/mailman/listinfo/dist2010
And we will be able to discuss details, ideas, as well as the schedule
there.

If you do want to participate, please echo the event to your respective
contributor community, and poke them to subscribe to the above mentioned
list and make proposals or inquiries there.

Thanks for reading so far, and hopefully we'll see you in Brussels for
FOSDEM 2010 :)

cheers
- --
  -o) Pascal Bleser <loki@...>    http://www.fosdem.org
  /\\     FOSDEM 2010 :: 6 + 7 February 2010 in Brussels
 _\_v Free and Opensource Software Developers European Meeting
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----- End forwarded message -----

--
The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters
works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is
trying to fool the system.
  http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:01:38AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> Executive summary: there will not be a Developers' Room for Debian at
> the next FOSDEM (nor for any other distribution, for that matter), but
> instead there'll be a "distribution miniconf" that we'll be able to
> participate in. They still need to flesh out the details on that one,
> though, and input is requested.

I, for once, think this is a bad idea, at least in the "extremist" form
(i.e. no devrooms at all) it has been presented. I surely agree that
having only devroom was bad and that FOSDEM can push a lot for
cross-distro collaboration this way. Nevertheless, devrooms were also
offering an amazing service to distro, and the argument that distros
have their conference anyhow is not convincing (Debian has one per year,
and alternate it around the world, having the additional devroom in a
fixed place once per year was definitively a plus; other small distros
do not have their own yearly conference, etc.).

If I'm not the only one feeling that way, I think we can try to make a
more reasonable proposal to the FOSDEM organizer: having the devroom
*and* the cross-distro meeting room. That can be coped with a simple
room: if you want a devroom for your own, you should participate in the
cross-distro room *as* *well* filling a number X of slots.

I'm Cc-ing the distributions@... list which is a cross-distribution
contact point. If the above proposal of mine is liked more than the
current proposal by other distro as well, we can have a more convincing
argument for advancing it.

Cheers.

--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime

[Jeremiah Foster-6]

On Oct 23, 2009, at 20:35, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:01:38AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>> Executive summary: there will not be a Developers' Room for Debian at
>> the next FOSDEM (nor for any other distribution, for that matter),  
>> but
>> instead there'll be a "distribution miniconf" that we'll be able to
>> participate in. They still need to flesh out the details on that one,
>> though, and input is requested.
>
> I, for once, think this is a bad idea, at least in the "extremist"  
> form
> (i.e. no devrooms at all) it has been presented. I surely agree that
> having only devroom was bad and that FOSDEM can push a lot for
> cross-distro collaboration this way. Nevertheless, devrooms were also
> offering an amazing service to distro, and the argument that distros
> have their conference anyhow is not convincing (Debian has one per  
> year,
> and alternate it around the world, having the additional devroom in a
> fixed place once per year was definitively a plus; other small distros
> do not have their own yearly conference, etc.).
>
> If I'm not the only one feeling that way, I think we can try to make a
> more reasonable proposal to the FOSDEM organizer: having the devroom
> *and* the cross-distro meeting room. That can be coped with a simple
> room: if you want a devroom for your own, you should participate in  
> the
> cross-distro room *as* *well* filling a number X of slots.

As someone who works with the maemo team I strongly agree that the  
current FOSDEM solution is sub-optimal. I would also like to see both  
the dev rooms and the distro rooms. Maybe that will take some of the  
pressure off the crowded dev rooms.

Jeremiah


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[Lucas Nussbaum]

(Also adding loki@... to Cc since the original email was from
this address)

On 23/10/09 at 11:35 -0700, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:01:38AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > Executive summary: there will not be a Developers' Room for Debian at
> > the next FOSDEM (nor for any other distribution, for that matter), but
> > instead there'll be a "distribution miniconf" that we'll be able to
> > participate in. They still need to flesh out the details on that one,
> > though, and input is requested.
>
> I, for once, think this is a bad idea, at least in the "extremist" form
> (i.e. no devrooms at all) it has been presented. I surely agree that
> having only devroom was bad and that FOSDEM can push a lot for
> cross-distro collaboration this way. Nevertheless, devrooms were also
> offering an amazing service to distro, and the argument that distros
> have their conference anyhow is not convincing (Debian has one per year,
> and alternate it around the world, having the additional devroom in a
> fixed place once per year was definitively a plus; other small distros
> do not have their own yearly conference, etc.).

I fully agree. I'm all for cross-distro collaboration, but I think that
this proposal goes too far. When I give a talk in the Debian devroom at
FOSDEM, I can expect the audience to be Debian developers or
power-users. If my audience changes to developers and power-users from
Debian and other distros, I can't give the anymore, and as a result, it
will be a lot less interesting for Debian devs and users.

> If I'm not the only one feeling that way, I think we can try to make a
> more reasonable proposal to the FOSDEM organizer: having the devroom
> *and* the cross-distro meeting room. That can be coped with a simple
> room: if you want a devroom for your own, you should participate in the
> cross-distro room *as* *well* filling a number X of slots.
>
> I'm Cc-ing the distributions@... list which is a cross-distribution
> contact point. If the above proposal of mine is liked more than the
> current proposal by other distro as well, we can have a more convincing
> argument for advancing it.

Another solution could be to have a joint session at the beginning of
the saturday afternoon, where each presenter in one of the
distro-specific devrooms would do a lightning talk about what he is
going to say, and how this could be of interest to the other distros'
developers.
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@...   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@...             GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 11:35:50AM -0700, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:01:38AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > Executive summary: there will not be a Developers' Room for Debian at
> > the next FOSDEM (nor for any other distribution, for that matter), but
> > instead there'll be a "distribution miniconf" that we'll be able to
> > participate in. They still need to flesh out the details on that one,
> > though, and input is requested.
>
> I, for once, think this is a bad idea, at least in the "extremist" form
> (i.e. no devrooms at all) it has been presented. I surely agree that
> having only devroom was bad and that FOSDEM can push a lot for
> cross-distro collaboration this way. Nevertheless, devrooms were also
> offering an amazing service to distro, and the argument that distros
> have their conference anyhow is not convincing (Debian has one per year,
> and alternate it around the world, having the additional devroom in a
> fixed place once per year was definitively a plus; other small distros
> do not have their own yearly conference, etc.).

That is true, but it certainly is not the only argument; nor, as I
understand it, the most important one.

As Debian's main contact to FOSDEM, the most consistent story I've been
hearing over the past few years is that FODSEM is just too popular for
its own good, and that there is too little space to accomodate all the
devroom requests. FOSDEM cannot move to another venue (typical
conference venues would either be prohibitely expensive or just not big
enough; and other campuses of the ULB do not have lecture hall the size
of Janson where keynotes can be held); and having 270+ talks in two days
is already going to be insane enough that adding more is not necessarily
a good idea anymore.

In that light, while I'm not extremely happy about the proposal to ditch
individual devrooms myself either, I personally feel that I cannot in
good conscience say that this proposal is bad unless I can come up with
an alternative that addresses this fundamental problem. To do otherwise
would be to yell that "$PET_PROJECT MUST HAVE A DEVROOM AT FOSDEM!!!1!",
and would only be selfish.

Therein, of course, lies the problem.

There aren't that many solutions to a problem of devroom shortage. You
could pick a few projects at random, and deny the request to other
projects. This is basically what's been done the past few years; except
that "at random" was defined as "you were here in the past and didn't
make such a mess of things that we'd rather try someone else this year".
You could lump two unrelated projects together and ask them to try to
make the best of things. That's what's been done with the "Debian/Free
Java" devroom back in 2004, and I can't call that an unconditional
success (basically, we just time-shared the room; the "shared talks"
period, which was intended to be for subjects of interest both to Free
Java and Debian people, was a complete failure, with talks that turned
out to be of real interest to neither group).

The only other solution that one could think of is that you try to lump
projects that *are* related together, and hope that the
cross-pollination produces something positive. Perhaps just dropping all
distributions into one devroom isn't the best way to accomplish that,
but it is better than the alternatives: rejecting mandriva and gentoo,
still rather important distributions last I checked, just because you
haven't got the space.

> If I'm not the only one feeling that way, I think we can try to make a
> more reasonable proposal to the FOSDEM organizer: having the devroom
> *and* the cross-distro meeting room. That can be coped with a simple
> room: if you want a devroom for your own, you should participate in the
> cross-distro room *as* *well* filling a number X of slots.

Given the above, and given that this would involve one "shared" devroom
*plus* a single devroom for each and every distribution, I can't agree
that this is "a more reasonable proposal".

However, I cannot really come up with a better alternative. You could
say "create a few devrooms of related distributions", but there already
has been a CentOS/Fedora shared devroom, and the other distributions
that have had devrooms at FOSDEM in the past (OpenSUSE, Debian, Gentoo)
are sufficiently different from eachother that lumping two or more of
them together in the same devroom isn't necessarily going to be better
than just lumping all distributions together.

I think that, given the context, Pascal's proposal really is the best
one, perhaps with the added condition that, say, there should still be
some time alotted for talks that really are distribution-specific,
alongside the time alotted for distribution-agnostic talks.

--
The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters
works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is
trying to fool the system.
  http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 01:38:04PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > If I'm not the only one feeling that way, I think we can try to make a
> > more reasonable proposal to the FOSDEM organizer: having the devroom
> > *and* the cross-distro meeting room. That can be coped with a simple
> > room: if you want a devroom for your own, you should participate in the
> > cross-distro room *as* *well* filling a number X of slots.
>
> Given the above, and given that this would involve one "shared" devroom
> *plus* a single devroom for each and every distribution, I can't agree
> that this is "a more reasonable proposal".

OK, by reading your detailed explanation I now imagine that the room
shortage is so severe that they cannot afford more than one devroom for
all participating distros. If that is the case, obviously this is the
only viable solution. I was imagining / hoping that a less consistent
reduction in distro-related devrooms was enough, according to that I was
seeing my proposal as "more reasonable" in the sense that it required
less room, but still not as few as one single room.

If there is room for one more room (pun not intended), I believe that
all distros would benefit from having a time-share of the extra room to
be handled with a distro-specific schedule. If there is not, obviously
we will cope with that.

Cheers.

PS nevertheless, thanks to all people involved in the FOSDEM
   organization (including Wouter for the Debian side), as always they
   do an impressive job to make us have fun together!

--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime

[Pascal Bleser-3]

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Hash: SHA1

On 10/28/2009 07:35 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 01:38:04PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>>> If I'm not the only one feeling that way, I think we can try to make a
>>> more reasonable proposal to the FOSDEM organizer: having the devroom
>>> *and* the cross-distro meeting room. That can be coped with a simple
>>> room: if you want a devroom for your own, you should participate in the
>>> cross-distro room *as* *well* filling a number X of slots.
>>
>> Given the above, and given that this would involve one "shared" devroom
>> *plus* a single devroom for each and every distribution, I can't agree
>> that this is "a more reasonable proposal".

Indeed :)

> OK, by reading your detailed explanation I now imagine that the room
> shortage is so severe that they cannot afford more than one devroom for
> all participating distros. If that is the case, obviously this is the
> only viable solution. I was imagining / hoping that a less consistent
> reduction in distro-related devrooms was enough, according to that I was
> seeing my proposal as "more reasonable" in the sense that it required
> less room, but still not as few as one single room.
>
> If there is room for one more room (pun not intended), I believe that
> all distros would benefit from having a time-share of the extra room to
> be handled with a distro-specific schedule. If there is not, obviously
> we will cope with that.

We could imagine something like that but one room to time-share just
wouldn't be enough. If Debian would like to have that, then there is no
reason we would deny it to the others. And if we have openSUSE, Fedora,
CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu (pending), Arch (pending), Gentoo, Exherbo and
Mandriva at FOSDEM 2010, that's 7 to 9 distro projects. Cannot possibly
time-share a single room on 2 days amongst that many participants.

We could already have more specialized topics as we will use 2, 3 or 4
rooms (4 currently being the upper limit IMO, although I'd much prefer
using 3 rooms max for the distro projects), such as a half-day track on
packaging, with one room being about RPM/zypp/yum/smart/..., the 2nd
room around dpkg/apt.
Also, there is absolutely no problem with proposing and holding sessions
about things that are specific to Debian. The difference is that it
should be geared more towards showcasing it to other distributions,
outlining the pros and cons, discussing with others how they (solve
those problems|accomplish those features), etc...

We are already providing around 20 rooms in total, and we cannot expand
beyond that, because
- - it would require more staff
- - there are no rooms nearby worth using
- - rooms that are far away are very problematic regarding their Internet
uplink (we cannot rely on ULB's network, too unpredictable), as well
as.. well.. being far away
- - having 250 sessions in 2 days is already more than enough ;)

cheers
- --
  -o) Pascal Bleser <loki@...>    http://www.fosdem.org
  /\\     FOSDEM 2010 :: 6 + 7 February 2010 in Brussels
 _\_v Free and Opensource Software Developers European Meeting
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[Wouter Verhelst]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 10:49:31PM +0100, Pascal Bleser wrote:

> On 10/28/2009 07:35 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 01:38:04PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> >>> If I'm not the only one feeling that way, I think we can try to make a
> >>> more reasonable proposal to the FOSDEM organizer: having the devroom
> >>> *and* the cross-distro meeting room. That can be coped with a simple
> >>> room: if you want a devroom for your own, you should participate in the
> >>> cross-distro room *as* *well* filling a number X of slots.
> >>
> >> Given the above, and given that this would involve one "shared" devroom
> >> *plus* a single devroom for each and every distribution, I can't agree
> >> that this is "a more reasonable proposal".
>
> Indeed :)
>
> > OK, by reading your detailed explanation I now imagine that the room
> > shortage is so severe that they cannot afford more than one devroom for
> > all participating distros. If that is the case, obviously this is the
> > only viable solution. I was imagining / hoping that a less consistent
> > reduction in distro-related devrooms was enough, according to that I was
> > seeing my proposal as "more reasonable" in the sense that it required
> > less room, but still not as few as one single room.
> >
> > If there is room for one more room (pun not intended), I believe that
> > all distros would benefit from having a time-share of the extra room to
> > be handled with a distro-specific schedule. If there is not, obviously
> > we will cope with that.
>
> We could imagine something like that but one room to time-share just
> wouldn't be enough. If Debian would like to have that, then there is no
> reason we would deny it to the others. And if we have openSUSE, Fedora,
> CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu (pending), Arch (pending), Gentoo, Exherbo and
> Mandriva at FOSDEM 2010, that's 7 to 9 distro projects. Cannot possibly
> time-share a single room on 2 days amongst that many participants.

There's no need for that. I do think that there should be space for
distribution-specific talks that are really of interest to people of
that distribution alone. But this can be organized in the same way as
the other distribution talks; that way, if no distribution-specific
talks are submitted from one distribution, then you don't have the
problem that you've got alotted time for them which nobody claimed.

> We could already have more specialized topics as we will use 2, 3 or 4
> rooms (4 currently being the upper limit IMO, although I'd much prefer
> using 3 rooms max for the distro projects), such as a half-day track on
> packaging, with one room being about RPM/zypp/yum/smart/..., the 2nd
> room around dpkg/apt.
> Also, there is absolutely no problem with proposing and holding sessions
> about things that are specific to Debian. The difference is that it
> should be geared more towards showcasing it to other distributions,
> outlining the pros and cons, discussing with others how they (solve
> those problems|accomplish those features), etc...

I don't think that's necessarily true. Yes, speakers should assume that
not just people from their pet distribution will be attending. However,
FOSDEM is supposed to be technical -- it should be fair game if speakers
assume pre-existing knowledge about their subject, whether this is a
programming language or a distribution.

--
The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters
works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is
trying to fool the system.
  http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html


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[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 10/29/2009 03:35 PM, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> I don't think that's necessarily true. Yes, speakers should assume that
> not just people from their pet distribution will be attending. However,
> FOSDEM is supposed to be technical -- it should be fair game if speakers
> assume pre-existing knowledge about their subject, whether this is a
> programming language or a distribution.

I'm a bit hesitant to suggest this so late in the process for 2010, but
has any serious consideration been given to finding a bigger space for
FOSDEM?

Certainly ULB Campus Solbosh has some history, but I think it is clear
that FOSDEM has outgrown that space, especially with regards to the
hallway tables and the distribution rooms.

~spot


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