The tenth edition of FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, takes place in Brussels on 6th and 7th February 2010.
About FOSDEM
FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community for the community. The goal is to provide Free Software and Open Source developers and communities a place to meet to:Participation and attendance is totally free, though the organization gratefully accepts donationals and sponsorships.
- get in touch with other developers and projects;
- be informed about the latest developments in the Free Software and Open Source world;
- attend interesting talks and presentations held in large conference rooms by Free Software and Open Source project leaders and committers on various topics; and
- to promote the development and the benefits of Free Software and Open Source solutions.
See http://www.fosdem.org for more information.
FOSDEM offers a great opportunity for the SiT! community to meet up with each other and the wider Free Software/Open Source community. In addition to the main FOSDEM event a "beer event" is organised for the Friday before, so Friday 5th this year. I am planning a SiT! code sprint for Friday afternoon before the beer event begins, I envisage this will be a great opportunity for some great team coding, sharing of ideas and solving problems as well as working up a thirst for some seriously good Belgian beer!
Ideally we'd like everybody involved with SiT! in some way to attend and with this in mind we have a limited fund available to sponsor travel and/or accommodation for a lucky few. This is thanks to our great success winning a prize at the Trophees du Libre in June.
To be able to plan and budget for this we ask people who need support to tell us as early as possible. This is so that we might take advantage of the cheaper flight prices and special offers that can be found.
- Are you interested in attending FOSDEM, but can't afford the entire trip?
- Are you working on any aspect of SiT!?
If so, please send a private email to ivan [at] sitracker [dot] org mentioning 'FOSDEM' in the subject line as soon as you can!
Please ensure you specify:
- the approximate travel costs, if booked well in advance
- whether or not you would be happy to share a hotel room
- how much of those costs are you able to pay yourself
- your contact information (phone required)
We will apply some common sense and fuzzy-logic filters and match the incoming requests against our vague idea of what the budget will look like and come back to you for further planning and information before 6th November 2009.
We will try to handle this process in a semi-open way. It will be kept private to some extent as many people are not comfortable about sharing travel dates and intentions publicly and might feel that their financial make up is a private issue.
The decisions about sponsorship won't be drawn by lot or decided on arbitrarily but according to our general consensus.
Ivan
