We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers!

Sat Jan 26 12:05:04 GMT 2013

Hi Duncan,

Thank you for this plea for assistance.  Much appreciated!

The last several years, we, a small group of people who have been 
(co-)organizers of YAPC::Europe, Perl Workshops, hackathons and Perl 
Monger meetings, have set up a Fosdem presence.  If I recall 
correctly, after some pressure and with a lot of help and 
coordination by Gabor Szabo.  I know of previous attempts, I think 
Dave Cross once tried to find some people interested in have a 
presence.  And our presence at Fosdem did not go unnoticed.

Fosdem is large, indeed.  But it is not commercial.  It is even a bit 
chaotic, some people say messy, and it is seriously informal.  Don't 
compare this to Oscon, or a YAPC.  It is as widely open source as can 
be as Oscon.  And some really crazy things happen here.  Real fun.

Support by the Perl community is more than welcome.  Sponsoring is 
welcome.  Attendance is free, a booth is free, a dev-room is free, so 
money is only needed for accomodations, travel, marketing 
materials.  Sponsoring would mostly be people-time: people to be at 
the booth, speakers in the dev-room, people to assist in the dev-room.

So maybe for next year, if a professional organisation would like to 
take over to coordinate this, some of us organisers might like 
that.  It depends...

Maybe a nice start of a discussion.

Kind regards,
Wendy van Dijk

At 12:20 PM 1/26/2013, Duncan Garland wrote:
 >Hi,
 >
 >Isn't this something TPF should get behind?
 >
 >The Perl Community organises good conferences but they tend to be for quite
 >small audiences. I've been told that YAPC Tokyo is the biggest with roughly
 >800 attendees and the next biggest ones are grouped around the 300 mark.
 >
 > Fosdem claims to attract 5000.
 >
 >We always talk about breaking out of the echo chamber, but never seem sure
 >about how to do it. Isn't this an important opportunity?
 >
 >Shouldn't TPF commit to sponsoring this today and then launch a drive to
 >find a commercial sponsor to reimburse TPF?
 >
 >(Perl still isn't listed on https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/ as having a
 >developer room.)
 >
 >Regards
 >
 >Duncan
 >
 >-----Original Message-----
 >From: london.pm-bounces at london.pm.org
 >[mailto:london.pm-bounces at london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Wendy G.A. van Dijk
 >Sent: 25 January 2013 20:41
 >To: london.pm at london.pm.org
 >Subject: We get a dev-room at Fosdem after all. Emergency Call for Papers!
 >
 >Hello all,
 >We know it is late, but we still have to try to make this work.
 >Maybe to save the honour and pride of Perl!  :-) Would you like to give a
 >presentation in Brussels, please send me and/or Claudio a proposal.
 >Today or tomorrow please.
 >Thanks!
 >Kind regards,
 >Wendy van Dijk
 >
 >========
 >
 >Dear Perl Mongers,
 >
 >I have to make this short and simple.
 >Therefore most of this email is copied from last year's Call for Speakers.
 >
 >What?  Fosdem, Brussels, 2 & 3 february 2013 https://fosdem.org/2013/
 >
 >Where? Free University Brussels, Campus Solbosh:
 >https://fosdem.org/2013/practical/transportation/
 >
 >Why so late?
 >Because our dev-room request was denied at first.
 >They gave it to another programming language community.
 >Now another community could not fill their dev-room.
 >We are Perl, so we jumped in and we asked for this.
 >We got it.  Now we have to fill it.
 >
 >So be quick and send in your presentation proposal.
 >
 >To:
 >Claudio Ramirez (nxadm, email: padre.claudio at apt-get.be) and Wendy van
 >Dijk (email: nl.pm at wendy.org).
 >
 >Thank you.  Hope to meet you all in Brussels.
 >
 >
 >__________________________________________________
 >
 >Copied and adapted from last year's Call for Speakers:
 >
 >
 >Please forward to your Perl contacts.
 >
 >__________________________________________________
 >
 >
 >Taking place in the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium), FOSDEM is the
 >biggest free and non-commercial European event organized by and for the
 >community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to
 >meet (see http://fosdem.org/2013/).
 >
 >Over the last years the Perl community had an increasing presence at FOSDEM.
 >Over the last two years we managed to have both a booth and a dev-room. We
 >collected an impressive positive return and wish to renew the experience.
 >
 >Our dev-room request for this upcoming edition (2013) was at first rejected,
 >in favor of another programming language community.
 >So we would only have a booth.  But another open source community could not
 >fill their dev-room and we hastily requested it for the Perl-community.
 >Yesterday we got approval.
 >
 >The stand request is approved some time ago.  The stand will be open
 >throughout the weekend. The dev-room event will take place Saturday,
 >February 2nd 2013 , between 11:00 and 19:00, in room AW.126.
 >The room itself has 75 seats, WIFI and a VGA projector.
 >
 >This environment, being a university classroom with raised seats, lends
 >itself perfectly for talks. This is a wonderful opportunity to present your
 >Perl project -big and small- or talk about subjects you care about. We are
 >looking for a variety of subjects on all levels:
 >starter and advanced, generic and specialized, core internals and CPAN. We
 >have 8 hours time, so we have the flexibility of using different time
 >formats: e.g. talks of 20 minutes, more classic talks of 40 minutes or
 >longer (although we learned from experience that longer talks should be
 >split into slices of 20 or 40 minutes).
 >
 >Please don't doubt to send a proposal (information about yourself, subject,
 >short description and time needed). If you have several subjects you are
 >enthusiastic to talk about please send alternative proposals. In the case
 >more than one talk is not selected, your proposal will help us when putting
 >the schedule together and even have backup talks in case someone cancels.
 >Also mention your time constraints (if any).
 >
 >Please send your talk proposal by e-mail to the address below as soon as you
 >read this.  You will receive an answer within 2 days.
 >We will submit a definitive schedule on Sunday 2013-01-27 to the FOSDEM
 >organizers.
 >
 >Please forward / distribute this call as wide as possible (certainly to your
 >local mongers).
 >
 >Claudio Ramirez (nxadm, email: padre.claudio at apt-get.be) and Wendy van
 >Dijk (email: nl.pm at wendy.org).
 >
 >NB1: This is a community event without sponsoring. We don't have the means
 >to pay for your trip and time. If you want to sponsor part of the event,
 >please feel free to contact us.
 >
 >NB2: We'll also appreciate volunteers, booth and dev-room. Please tell us
 >your availabilities so we can also prepare a planning for this.