Hi all,
We have a date for FOSDEM 2026: January 31st to February 1st
This means we also have a date for Summit 28: January 29th - January 30th
As the person who has (co)organized the last two summits I would like
to start a discussion on the next summit by asking a few questions and
floating some ideas.
• How did you like the format of the last three summits? (Renting a
conference room in a hotel with lunch provided (in buffet style) by
the hotel)
• Do you have a concrete lead for some company or organization that
could provide us with a conference room for free in the city of
Brussels? I’m not asking for vague suggestions like "maybe someone
could try to reach out to xyz" I’m asking if you personally know
someone who has a key to a room.
• Do we want a 1 day or 2 day summit? Last year the 'official' part of
the summit was over after 1.2 days and had we known this we could have
probably managed to squeeze it all into one day.
• If we do a repeat of the last two (three) years (which i feel is
somewhat likely due to how difficult it is to find places that would
have us for free and because I’m under the impression that people like
the "fancy environment" with the snacks and the fancy bottles of
water) I feel somewhat strongly that we should switch to a model in
which every participant pays for their own seat (at per cost) and add
a fairly generous fee-waiver on top of it.
I’m very much in favor of keeping the Summit accessible.
(Socio)economicly speaking our community is very diverse. We have
people in our community who would not be able to come if they had to
pay the ~250 Euro the hotel charges us per person. But we also have
people in our community to whom this is a rounding error in the
overall travel+accommodation cost. (I have personally been on both
sides of this.)
The XSF notoriously doesn’t have a lot of money and efforts to change
this over the last 3 years haven’t been very successful. Switching to
a fee waiver model would allow board (or whoever) to set aside a fixed
amount and send x (where x=10 for example) applicants to the summit
for free.
cheers
Daniel
