DebConf5Meeting20041101

Agenda (during the meeting) and minutes (afterwards) of DebConf5 IRC meeting, November 1, 2004.

People mentioned (not necessarily present at the meeting):

• Lars Wirzenius
• Jesus Climent
• Aschwin van der Woude
• Andreas Schuldei
• Jeff Bailey
• Arto Teräs
• Fabian Fagerholm
• Jukka Rajala
• Wolf Bergenheim
• Marcela Tiznado
• Gunnar Wolf
• Martin Langhoff
• Holger Levsen

IRC log is at http://www.v7w.com/debconf5-20041101.html

Meeting started at 20:00 UTC.

1. Action points from previous meeting.
   • Jesus, Aschwin: Web site needs to document public transportation options and costs. This can be done late in the spring, no hurry.
   • Lars: Have asked Jukka Rajala if he is still wants to help with graphical design and web site design and he said yes. He will mail Michelle and others when his current hectic job is done, in about two weeks.
   • Lars: Haven't yet talked to Fluendo or other parties about video streaming talks. There should be time enough to do this next year.
   • Andreas: Call for travel sponsorship requests sent to debian-devel-announce on October 4.
   • Aschwin, Jeff, Arto, Fabian: Press coverage meeting didn't happen on IRC, but did happen over e-mail. http://ajt.iki.fi/temp/dc5-press.txt
2. Status reports
   • Jesus (via Lars): Room situation. Waiting for the final price from HUT.
   • Andreas: Sponsors, requests for sponsorships. Got 15 individual sponsorship requests after the mail to debian-devel-announce, both cheap and expensive ones, total about ten thousand US dollars. Contacted Canonical, Sun, IBM for getting money. Canonical won't commit to sponsoring now, Sun and IBM haven't responded yet. Have informed Bdale about the current situation and HP will hopefully respond soon.
   • Wolf: Public web site. Drupal is installed, but no content yet. Marcela offered to help. Local Finnish people needed, especially for content related to local stuff. Lars will help with that at least a bit. Andreas: web site should be sufficiently presentable within about two months.
   • Gunnar (via Andreas): ConfMS (conference management system) is mostly implemented already, forked a special version for Helsinki and is now working on that. Sleeping room allocation to be done manually before the conf and listed in a static web page.
   • Arto: Press team. Meeting via e-mail concentrated mostly on things other than press release contents, such as their timing and video streaming. Contacts with Martin Langhoff and through him with Fluendo. linux.conf.au in April will do video streaming, their experiences should be helpful. Also with Manuel Lora from xiph.org. Video streaming software seems to be in good order, need to get video gear and people to operate it, however. Holger Levsen wrote an article for iX magazine about DebConf4 and could write one about DebConf5 as well.
   • Jeff: Speakers, call for papers. CFP not yet sent, due to Jeff unexpectedly having his birthday. Singing on channel. Expects to send out CFP draft to list this week and the real version a week later.
   • Andreas: Has asked IBM International about them lending us laptops for those who can't bring their own machines. No reply yet.
3. Roadmap : Important milestones for things that must be done before, during, and after DebConf5.
   • Call for papers.
   • Finalization of renting housing and hack and conference space.
   • Set up of computer infrastructure for the event.
   • Web site (by early January).
   • Probably others, please point out.
   • Consensus: good idea, will be done over e-mail on the mailing list.
4. Wiki pages : Is anyone updating DebConf5 wiki pages? Why do we have Confboth debconf5 and DebConf5 pages in the same wiki? (We don't, anymore.) Is this a problem and should someone take responsibility for keeping things up to date? It would be good to have someone who cares for the wiki pages.
5. "Debconf organizer's guide" : We've soon had half a dozen instances of DebConf. Having a checklist of things that need to be taken care of would make things easier on future organizers. Agreement? This would include things like:
   • Things the web site should include (local transportation, eating options, sightseeing, conference schedules, minutes for preparationary meetings, etc)
   • Things to be done for the physical location (what kinds of rooms, how many, furniture, etc)
   • Computing infrastructure (network, power, servers, a mirror of Debian, etc)
   • Probably more, feel free to suggest

This looks like a good thing to do. Lars proposes we collect points while making DebConf5 and then meet at the actual event to flesh it out. Andreas started an Alioth project about this after DebConf4, but nothing came out of that so far. http://hackers.propus.com.br/~pablo/debconf4/place-report.html should be useful as a start.

Action points:

• Lars: Check with Jesus whether the price he is waiting for includes beds and furniture.
• Andreas or Lars: Start discussion on the -team mailing list about the roadmap.
• Andreas: Mail about the Alioth project for a DebConf organizer's guide or howto to -team.

The meeting ended at 21:12 UTC.

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