[Members] XMPP Summit 28 (We have a date!)

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