Dear Smalltalking Friends, Please tell me what you'd like to happen there. We have a good opportunity to show why we believe in smalltalk. I can do a 'Back to the future, (re)learning smalltalk' session. Stephan Begin forwarded message:
From: Pascal Bleser <pbleser@fosdem.org> Date: 10 november 2011 23:58:43 GMT+01:00 To: Stephan Eggermont <stephan@stack.nl> Cc: devrooms@fosdem.org Subject: [FOSDEM 2012] Devroom accepted: Smalltalk Reply-To: devrooms@fosdem.org
Hi Stephan
We've got good news, as we have accepted and planned your request for a developer room at FOSDEM 2012 for the following topic/project: Smalltalk
We will provide you with the following: - room AW1.126 with 72 seats, - a video projector (VGA) - wireless internet, on Sunday 5th for 8 hours.
If you prefer to decline this offer, please inform us as soon as possible.
We must add that as in previous years, visitor interest will outnumber room capacity for most devrooms. We can not offer you larger rooms -- instead we will provide you with signalization to indicate that the room is full.
We will have more rooms in total as compared to previous editions, so hopefully that will balance the crowd across the various areas of the venue.
Regarding content and format, you are free to schedule your devroom as you wish (presentations, discussions, brainstorming, workshops, BOFs, hacking sessions, ...).
Do allow us to repeat the obvious: FOSDEM is a FOSS community event, by and for the community, and the content and topics _must_ reflect that (arguably, that is pretty obvious). It is also a technical conference, as our view is that the very broad spectrum of Free and open source projects should work together rather than fighting religious wars -- at least when at FOSDEM -- and we would like you to respect that, especially given the very diverse palette of projects that are present at the event.
We invite you to send out an open call for talks to relevant mailinglists, including fosdem@lists.fosdem.org. We will collect all call for talks and announce them on our website next week.
We offer each of the devrooms a NAME-devroom@fosdem.org mailman mailinglist, in case you want to have a mailinglist "on neutral grounds". This can be especially interesting for devrooms that aggregate several projects. Contact us at devrooms@fosdem.org to take on this offer.
We will most probably provide you with a tool (website) to send us the schedule containing all information necessary for the website and the booklet. More information on that later, as it is still work-in-progress. (Yeah, we said that last year too but it might actually work this time ;))
The hours listed above are the schedulable hours. We recommend to plan the first 15min or so with a little welcome talk so you can prepare the first "real" speaker (network, connect to video projector, etc...). We can also open the room a bit earlier for preparations. We expect the rooms to be empty 30 minutes after the last talk on your schedule, as we need to clean the rooms up and close them with the security staff.
For stocking material overnight, we have a large room in the H building ("Ferrer", next to the Infodesk) that will be locked from Saturday 18:00 to Sunday 09:00. However, there is no insurance whatsoever and we take no responsibility for stolen or damaged goods, even though there is a security team at the venue, including during the night.
For us, you are the devroom responsible. This means that we will communicate everything through you, and you will be the one we will poke for information ;)
Also, during the weekend, we want you to do good housekeeping of the room: - we will offer trash bags for the garbage, and we would very much welcome not finding garbage lying around in the room when you leave (simply draw the attention of the crowd in your devroom on that point on a regular basis), - there is a limit on the room capacity that may not be exceeded (by much) for obvious security reasons.
Please understand that we are a non for profit association, and that every single organization team member works on FOSDEM during their spare time. As such, it would be very nice if we didn't have to spend several hours cleaning up the devrooms, and it is just a very small amount of work for the attendees to put their garbage into the trash bags. We will supply each room with a sufficient amount of the latter.
The deadline for sending in the full schedule will be Saturday 2012-01-21, so we advise you to decide on the content by the turn of the year or earlier (earlier = more time for participants to book their arrangements for travel and stay). We don't do that to put you artificially under pressure but, instead, in order to have the complete schedule to present to visitors and on the various mobile applications for the FOSDEM schedule, as well as to include your devroom schedule into the booklet. There are 21 sessions in parallel at all times during the event and, hence, if you would like to draw some crowd of interested contributors, it does help when it's on the schedule :)
Lastly, we wish to clarify that there are no reimbursements of travel or hotel costs for devroom organizers/speakers on our behalf. The idea behind the devrooms is that we provide the infrastructure (room, video projector, wifi internet uplink) for free to Free and open source projects, and your job is to spread a public or internal call for papers to your respective community, collect those proposals, compose a schedule, and provide us with that information.
You are of course free to find your own sponsors to fund costs for participants, but they will not be endorsed as "FOSDEM sponsors" and hence not listed in the sponsors section on our website.
And, of course, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at devrooms@fosdem.org
For urgent matters, you may also contact me (Pascal Bleser) on my mobile: +32 486 071035 -- I speak French and German as native languages and English fluently. Please keep in mind that I live in the CET timezone though :)
Looking forward to your participation, On behalf of the FOSDEM team, -- Pascal Bleser <loki@fosdem.org> http://fosdem.org/ FOSDEM 2012 ::: 4 + 5 February 2012 in Brussels, Belgium Free and Opensource Software Developers European Meeting