The IPFire project has got an annually developer summit. The close followers of the project will know about that, I am sure. There are some things about those events I would like to discuss with you guys. So if you are interested in meeting with us and fellow IPFire users, please read on…
The last summits have been really great. It is always great meeting the other guys and we usually have lots of nice topics to talk about and things to play with. We always took an extended weekend and met at various places (Nuremberg, Dusseldorf, Wiesbaden, the Ruhr Area – all Germany and London, UK) and every time there were new people to learn to know. The most important benefit for me is that we get to know each other and that helps us very much with working on the project. You know who you can approach with a problem and get it solved much quicker. In the end we are all people and people should not only communicate over bug reports.
However, the number of people attending the summits has been declining for a while now. Reasons for that are some of the obvious: No time, didn’t get a couple of days off from the job, illnesses and similar things. A different reason we hear very often is something along the lines “What should I do on a developer summit? I am not a developer…” what made us aware of the fact that the name is just wrong. It does not refer to what the summits have ever been and not we want them to be. There are many more people involved in the project who are not “developers”, but rather called writers, translators, administrators, content creators and more…
So we are finally at this point were we want to get out to you and ask you what you think this event should be. I want to hear your ideas about how you would like to see this event or share your experiences from other meetups you have been to. The goal is to make this the community event the IPFire project wants and needs.
I would like to propose some ground lines, though: The event will take place in Europe at a location where you can get easily by car or plane. Most of the people who are involved in this project are from Central Europe and I am very much interested in keeping travelling costs to a minimum for each and everyone. We are currently targeting the first weekend in September (probably Thu to Sun). We will require you to sign up for attending so we can do proper planning and pick a location that is big enough. And that’s about it. From here on we can all together go ahead and think about the rest.
In the past we had all sorts of different things we did. We had several talks about some specific things. Ideas of new features have been informally presented by someone and discussed by the group. We did a brief excursion to the Telehouse in the London Docklands where the London Internet Exchange (LINX) is located. And we spent entire days talking or fixing each others bugs.
There are many things I can imagine to do, but the point here is to see what most people want. The goal is not to get as most people as possible to meet, but the people who really care about the IPFire project. Those are obviously not just the developers. Maybe some people just want to say hi. Maybe other people want a fixed schedule with talks and learn more about the project or get more involved into it. This is what I want to figure out now. There have been some approaches to establish a Stammtisch which seem to have failed because of too large distances nobody can possibly drive just for a beer. Maybe we can combine this with the IPFire summit?! I don’t know.
Let’s just see what we can come up with. I opened a thread on the forums where we can get into a discussion and I am looking forward to hear from you – either if you say that you have interest stopping by or if you have an idea…