 Okay, welcome everybody to the DEPCOM 15 and Heidelberg session. This is the outline. We will shortly recap our bit process because we did it slightly different than other bits used to do it in the past. So we just want to share our experience. Maga is going to do that. And then we'll talk about where it is and how you get there. Renee is going to talk about that. And then the venue that we found, which Martin will present, and I will talk a bit about conference and timing and all that stuff at the end. So without further ado, that's to Maga. So Germany had already tried to go for the DEPCOM before and it hadn't worked out very well. So when we talked about this last year, we decided to do it in a different way. So instead of looking in a particular city, like a bunch of us lived in Munich, but other people lived in Berlin or in other cities. You will see in a map later. And instead of looking in a particular city, we said we will look everywhere. Where's the best place to have the DEPCOM in Germany? Regardless of where we live. So not putting our residence address in the question. And so we looked. Okay. So first, during the DEPCOM 13, we decided that we would do this. A lot of people were interested. So we kind of created a local team and we took this decision that this was what we were going to do. After the DEPCOM 13, then... So there were more than 75 different venues that were queried. Like looked at and checked if they would work as DEPCOM venue or not. From these 75 plus venues, first we had a list of nine that were prospective for which we tried to find any possible problems that we may have with those venues. Like with the network work, with getting their work, etc. Would it be big enough? Because some of the venues were discarded because they would be like for 200 people. For Germany, we expect that we will get much more than 200 attendees. So if it was not big enough, we discarded them. And so we went from nine to five to in the end three, which were Munich, Heidelberg and Treitlingen. The one in Treitlingen was very interesting because it was like the whole city would be hosting us. There would not be like... It's a very small town. So it would be like DEPCOM takes over Treitlingen. Yeah, in the end we ended up dropping it because they didn't have a suitable venue for the conferences. So it was very nice as the idea, but it wouldn't have worked. And so when the time came for the bid submission, we had two very well worked out possibilities. That were like we had done a lot of work for both of them, trying to find the possible problems, trying to find solutions for the possible problems. The first one was in Munich. It was a split option, the accommodation in a hostel, the conference in a university that is nearby. The second one in Heidelberg, which is everything in one place. So the hostel includes the conference rooms, so everything will be in one place. And we submitted these two different bids that both had their pros and cons. So having everything in one place, it's a big pro, but the one in Munich was in the middle of a very big city. Heidelberg is a city, it's very nice, but it's smaller compared to Munich. So we thought that being in a bigger city would be a plus, and that's why we worked with the Munich bid for quite a while. When we finally got the bid, we still had these two options, although it was very clear from the global team that they very much preferred Heidelberg. So we kind of knew that we would go with Heidelberg, but we used the fact that we hadn't yet settled to negotiate with the venue, better prices, better conditions, etc., because we were saying, okay, we can also do it in Munich, so there was interest for the venue to give us better prices. This was a bit, I'm telling you, everything was great, but I know that it was a problem for the DevConf committee to make a decision because of this split option, so it also had it downsides. For the DevConf committee, it was very hard to make a decision because we were proposing two bids that were very different, and so it also had it downsides, but we really profited from the fact that we could play one bid against each other and got a very good deal from that. So, yeah, finally after it was decided, we decided to go with Heidelberg. That was like in May or April, and since then we have been working with the Heidelberg venue to create the best possible DevConf. This is you, I think? Okay, yeah, this is a map of where we are, but it's not well rendered. Technical difficulties prevent to show the most important part. Is there any way that we can put it so that Heidelberg shows up? So Heidelberg would be like here. Okay, just a machine. Heidelberg is here. Munich is here. We have a bunch of people here. So this is like where people are. Okay, yeah. Well, let me take this over because this is still a local team. Just to give you an idea, I put down these numbers. So we had three main things. We had this DevConf 13 meeting where we had around 18 people. Then on the bit we had people signing up for, as a local team, there was 17 people and we actually had a kickoff meeting, which I think was just cut off the last slide because we all went to the venue to decide and to have a look at it for a weekend, and there was 18 people going there. But actually the union of all is 37 people and 12 people were there two out of three times. So it's not the same people all the time, which is clear because there's nine months in between. So some people came after, of course, they were not at DevConf 13 and some people left or didn't make it to the kickoff meeting. So it's a bit unclear how many people there really are, but just so you get some numbers. On the other hand, of course, not everybody is as active, so I wouldn't say that there's 37 totally active people on local teams. So yeah. Yeah, well, you probably know where Germany is, but to reiterate we are in the center of Europe, middle of Europe. This is Heidelberg, actually. This is Heidelberg, actually, like the bridge to the old city. You can see the castle over the top. It's a ruin. It's 150 inhabitants cities divided by a river. It has history to the medieval times, to the Roman times even. It's a popular tourist location. I don't actually know why. But there was many Asian people and... It's not popular with Germans. I don't know why, but yeah, many Asian people and many people from other countries come in there. We have a pretty old city, the Altstadt, and it's even the White Heritage site. So this is an image I stole from Wikipedia, from the city area view. You see the venue marked. It's directly on the river banks and directly near the zoo. The old city is like here. The castle is that one. Just to say that this is the university as well, so it's not like in the middle of nowhere. This is the old city, this is the university, and we're quite close by. Yeah, the Heidelberg main station is here. So it's also quite connected to the public transport. Yeah, and Martin is taking over for the venue itself. So because you love watching how I use computers, there's of course one thing we can do. That was one of them. There we go. So now you know what Germany looks like. All right, so the venue we found in Heidelberg is a youth hostel. It's just a few kilometers out of the city center. I thought it was much less, but then when we actually walked to the city center it took a lot longer than I expected. It's wedged sort of between the river, as you saw. There's a zoo nearby, so in case you want to have a break from the conference, that'll be great. The university is nearby, so we're hoping to have some liaison with the university going on, maybe invite some people to the open day, and maybe there's some cool stuff happening at the university at the same time. And there's a bus stop right in front of the venue that'll take you to transportation sites and also to the center town, and we believe the bus goes until shortly after midnight or something like that. But one of the benefits of... There you go, look. As we saw on the map, or every view, it's right in the city center, so you need like 10 minutes from the bus from the main station. There's a bus stop on the venue, also it's hot on the last light. The next airport is Frankfurt. If you go from international flights, from there you need one hour, one hour 30 depending on the connection. And if you go from the regional airport, you can also go to Stuttgart or Karlsruhe Badenbahn. FKB is Karlsruhe Badenbahn, which is a bit longer because they are not very well connected to the rest of the high-speed trains. You need one hour 45 to two hours. Karlsruhe, not in the morning. You will be stuck in the morning. Or if you go from Switzerland or from France, you have to go directly to Karlsruhe or Mannheim and you can just switch. The same ICE from Basel, also the same Karlsruhe in Mannheim. And from there you can just take your S-Bahn for 20 minutes. So it's easily reachable. What's parking like on site? Yeah, it's a city. So let me address your question, Steve. What's parking like on site? The university is nearby and we're going to be off the term. So theoretically you can park your car any way you want. The Youth Hostel also has, I believe, 27 spaces during DEPCAMP. Those are available on the first come first serve basis and during DEPCAMP there are hours. So we have again the technical problem. So that you see a bit of the, have a bit of a fashion of the airport connections. This is Frankfurt, of course, which is the biggest hub in Germany. So anyone who comes from intercontinental flights will go to Frankfurt. Suckert is over there and the region airport, Karlsruhe, is like here. So you can also take Munich, but take it a bit longer. So apparently I get to do the venue and this is a little bit of an improv. Let's look at pictures together and I'm going to tell you something about it. So we have a couple of impressions here just so that you get an idea. You can see that it's spacious. We're actually currently standing pretty much at the zoo and we're looking at the venue. So what you see up here is a balcony similar to what we have over there, with the main talk room behind it. And from the balcony you can actually see squirrels and all kinds of other animals that are in the zoo and they are sometimes loud. It's a little bit outside the venue. You can see some seating spaces here. There's probably the, I think the sports court that we may or may not be allowed to use yet. I don't know. It's over on that side. This is close by the front entrance. You can see that the venue is itself pretty modern. They pretty much redid it in 2006 I believe and you can still feel that. I mean, it's a very nice venue. Some outside eating spaces close to the cafeteria, beer garden style. Here you have some of the imagery into the zoo from the balcony. And this is the welcome lobby. So at the far back here you can see the reception which is where you're going to be received and you get to pay and get your badge and stuff. And then this could be an area where they are like, you know, sponsors presenting themselves a little bit. It's quite spacious. It's open. It's nice. Like the rest of the venue to be honest. There are a lot of spaces like this in the venue which we thought could actually then become hack areas. So maybe we're going to get rid of the entire hack labs concept and have some hack areas. But that's to be discussed. This is one of the two dining rooms. There's another one that's closer to the outside. And then also on the outside they are set up to handle people eating there and pretty much anywhere. Food's very good. We went there. Part of the reason was to convince the team that this is a venue that we could have DEVCONF at and so we ate dinner. We didn't eat dinner. We ate lunch there and then we ate breakfast the next day. And I think the general response was that this is, you know, above average youth hostel food. It's probably better than this one. Here you go. Outside. This is sort of an inner courtroom inside the venue. So you court yard. That's right. So you have rooms all around it and they eat here and there's a lot of other things that have happened. They are already at the youth hostel. For instance a band has played and all that kind of stuff. So we're looking into these sort of things and taking ideas of course. Is there a curfew on that outdoors area? During DEVCONF, yes. We have to abide strictly by the rules of the youth hostel so I think that's going to be pretty much like 10 o'clock. That doesn't mean you can't be outside but they're going to enforce quietness. During DEVCONF we have the entire venue to ourselves. Does that answer your question? So there's a volleyball court. As you can see the sports pitch is behind that. And this is one of the rooms. I don't know what kind of room this is. So the different rooms that they have available. Is this the last one? Different rooms that they have available are two, three, four and six bed rooms. Each of the rooms has their own bathroom. It's actually quite high standard. We have plenty of space for instance to accommodate for families and to accommodate for special needs. It's fully accessible. I think there are six rooms that are completely wheelchair accessible and also for people with other disabilities. Easy to reach because they're very close to where everything is happening. So I'm going to just quickly go through these facts and then in case you have any questions about the venue I guess we'll get to that later. Michael already said that. We're going to go to a night hack lab or walk to and from food. It's all going to be in one space. We're just going to make it much more intense than this week has already been. Exclusive access, I said that. This means a lot to us. So we prioritized this. We actually ended up paying a little bit more money than we had to, but now we're going to be just us. Or at least we get to decide who's in. There are about 450 beds. 430, we'll say 400 for now in two to six bedrooms. We have a number of different rooms. Three main talk rooms with the sizes 250, 120 and 40. Although 40 could also be a buff room. And then we have eight rooms for 10 to 20 people. So we would like to provide you with a lot of space to do ad hoc type things in addition to hack areas outside and in the common spaces of the venue in general. Internet. I'm not allowed to say we don't have internet there. We are currently setting it up. So we will have a one gigabit fiber link that goes via the zoo to the university. It's one of the coolest zoos, seriously. The guy that the IT technician of the zoo was hired like 10 years ago and he convinced the CEO of the zoo to like put fiber throughout the entire zoo just in case you want to have an information board. You need fiber for that everywhere, right? So this is the most modern zoo of the world and we're 25 meters from it. Food arrangements during Debcon, again, we can pretty much set the times ourselves within certain limits. Also the venue can cater for all dietary restrictions except for people who are eating strictly kosher. But we have never had a request for that as far as I know. We have? Okay, as far as I know, I'm glad I said that. Well, let's not discuss that here. It's just not possible, but that is not our choice or a statement. The cheese and wine party is theoretically not allowed to be held inside the venue, but we're going to have it inside the venue. That took a little bit of work. But it'll be great because they'll provide us with cutlery and glasses and everything and they'll clean up after us, so. We're thinking about upping the level of childcare that we offer. Seeing many kids here, I would love to see many more next year and we realize that we have some work to do on that. If you're interested, that's one of the ways you can join. Yeah, we have to do some work on that I meant the Orga team in preparing to host kids. The rest is up to you guys. And there's a disco in the basement. We're allowed to use it. There's also musical instruments all over the place. We're going to be allowed to use them. For instance, two pianos. There are going to be a couple of guitars. There's a setup with speakers and so on. There's a karaoke going somehow. If that's what we want. And I think that's it from my part about the venue. So should we do a couple of questions? I wanted to ask you two questions. First, what is the situation regarding booze? And second, what is the nearest bar? I can see over the years in Deppcon forga the priorities of things are shifting. Where's the booze? Where's the bar? It is true that the Cheesan Wine Party was very problematic to get going because they do not allow you to bring booze into the venue. As a matter of fact, they don't really allow you to bring food and drinks and all that kind of stuff. However, I already told them that there are going to be people who have their own desires and mate and all that kind of stuff needs to be able to go in and say, yeah, we'll just look up or somewhere else. There will be a bar, pretty similar, I'd say, to install to DC-13. It's going to be right at the entrance in that hall that you saw in the picture. And they are going to be serving snacks that are also more substantial, like, for instance, packaged sandwiches in case you're very hungry in the midnight. A range of local beers and wines. And I suppose pretty much anything else we ask them to. They will not serve to intoxicated persons and so on and so forth. So pretty much standard rules and I'm sure we're going to be able to deal with that. Just fine. The next bar would probably be in town. So you'd have to take a bus, so you'd have to walk. Which is doable and it's actually a nice walk along the river. Just before I take your question, I wanted to say one thing which I forgot. I have to say we were very lucky with this venue. They're really cool. A bit of related question. If we get sick of the food in the cafeteria and want to go to another restaurant, are there any immediately around or do we have to take the trip to the city and how, in general, is the dietary situation at the other restaurants? Yeah, well, you know, you're not going to find fantastic choice of vegan restaurants with really, really good food like you do here in Heidelberg, I'm afraid. I'm pretty sure you can find pretty much anything for any dietary requirements. It might just not be as easy as it is here, ubiquitous as it is here. Yes, I was going to get to them. So this is in town, which is two and a half kilometers. About 45 minutes is what we walked, right? Thereabouts. There are a couple of sports places nearby. Now I'm not talking about sports bars like you would see here, but like, you know, in Germany, every single sports club also has a bar and a restaurant. Sometimes they're going to be like simple pizzerias, which is good food. I think there's a Greek restaurant nearby. There's actually a sort of like beach club, which probably offers some stuff within walking distance. So there are a few choices, unless you want to walk all the way into town. Our idea was to provide high quality food that changes every day and doesn't get you sick, both ways, you know, like you don't, you won't. So that we, you don't actually have to flee. That's our goal, and we're going to keep doing that. Just a testimonial that last year at DeppConf 13, the bar and food onsite were both good enough that people who attended were mostly happy with what was available onsite. So that's evidence that it can be done well in a way that DeppConf is happy with. So I suppose a similar question in terms of accommodation. Say for people who aren't necessarily going to stay in a hostel or the other hotels nearby. In preparing this conference in an all-in-one venue, we did consider this from the very start and we believe that pretty much anyone who would want to stay at a hotel is going to be okay as well at the youth hostel. It is high standard for a youth hostel. However, I know that this is not a satisfactory answer to everyone. There's a Marriott Hotel, and it's about 1.5 kilometers. That's the closest. If you have a car onsite anyway, then it's probably not going to be a problem because they offer parking. And there's one hotel that's also reachable. I think it's the Marriott even by bus. So, I mean, it's doable, but so far we haven't allocated any resources to making special arrangements for those hotels simply because we believe that you're going to be fine at the venue and we hope that you will actually come and stay at the venue. Yeah, so the Marriott is on the other side of the river, so it's not totally clear which bridge you have to take and how long it takes, but yeah, 10 minutes. And it's a 10-minute bus ride to the city center and the main station. There's lots of hotels there, except you're not at that conference. So if you really want to be in a hotel, you can do that. We don't actually suggest that, but it's certainly doable. Hyde America has 3 million visitors each year, so there's a lot of hotels. I think Matt was first. I'm wondering if any of the different size rooms have refrigerators or kitchens and also grocery store nearby, because that would be one way of dealing with dietary requirements as well. I don't think that we're going to be very lucky on that one. There are very strict rules as to who can bring the food into a youth hostel in Germany, and they have to abide by that, so I don't think that they provide cooking facilities. The nearest grocery store is about 2 kilometers. By bus you can reach that as well. On the other hand, they are very relaxed and very cool people. I'm going to go and meet with them soon with the cooks and discuss the entire food situation and so on. If you have any input on that, I'd love to hear it. We can push for things. They've already gone a long way away from the standard to what we expect from them, including making sure that no food gets wasted and that we have literally almost all dietary requirements catered for. I'm tempted at this stage to say that people are going to be happy and okay with the exception of kosher people. If you feel strongly about this, then I would love to hear your input and maybe I can take it to them and maybe we can actually make the conference better for everyone in that sense. Some previous DEBCOMPS have had one refrigerator for the whole DEBCOMPS that people could put things in, including cheese for the wine and cheese, and that was sufficient to solve the problem. Might there be a group of bicycles available? While we're looking into that, I think it's useful. It's on the list. I'm not sure the Youth Hostel has any of them, but we will try to provide something. The Youth Hostel has about 30 bikes that they rent out on a daily basis, and there are other ways to get bikes too, so there'll be bikes. Are most of the rooms two people or four people or mostly six people? Mostly four and six. The six people rooms have actually two bathrooms, and they have split bathrooms, so you can wash your teeth when someone is using the toilet and stuff like that. Because I was a bit afraid of the bathroom situation, so I looked into that. So it's still usable, even the six people room. Any more questions about when you're on a location? This place seems really cool. Thank you for finding it. Thanks. Right, so there's not a lot of time left. We thought also that we really want to have a depth camp again. It's basically negotiated already, I believe. This will be... This will be the week before. This time we would like, as a suggestion, we would like to have an open weekend where the first two days, there will be talks like we had this Saturday, but maybe try to get this even more out. I'll spread out to a weekend. We will certainly try to arrange a conference dinner or a meeting, but we will certainly try to arrange a conference dinner or, again, a barbecue like we had last year. To get this covered, we haven't really started looking into this yet seriously. As you saw, we have two rather big rooms and one smallish, medium room. So we're right now thinking about how we can set this up. Maybe we can have two tracks of talks and one buff track at the same time and then prompt to sessions like we had this time. We're also thinking about thinning out the talks towards the end so there's more ad hoc sessions because we saw that a lot of people came up with cool ideas, tried to have ad hoc sessions and it was always kind of difficult to schedule them. But in general, I think, otherwise, the whole thing seems to have worked out really well now and we don't want to change so much compared to this year. It would be really cool if you guys had any input from how it worked this year with relation to how it worked in the previous years and you just sent that to us. Just a small thing regarding Depcamp. I think I heard that it's going to clash with the CCC camp. Probably many people will be interested in both. Right, so we have a slide on timing right after this so we'll just discuss this. We thought about possibly having a job fair at this open weekend out of the place so if regular Depcamp attendees don't necessarily have to go there but if sponsors are interested in providing that and people are interested in talking to prospective employers we might have that on site in one of the rooms and possibly also make it possible for our sponsors to present themselves again only on the weekend. So this would be opening weekend, more targeted to us public and then the rest of the week would be open or would be just a regular Depcamp. Another thing we thought about is might having a kind of a poster session where teams just present what they're working on and everybody can walk around and talk to them. So right now we have all these bits from and everybody has to go there and then we can just have a walk around as there are in some conferences. We are looking into this, we will see how it works. Music and everything, we talked about Habracona, let's just skip this. The timing, right, so these are the dates. This will be August 15th to 22th from Saturday to Saturday. Depcamp will be until Friday and probably start on the earlier Saturday. So it's useful to arrive on Friday evening or Saturday morning if you can. There are adjacent free software events who are still to be confirmed, this is what Tincho said. So there's the CCC camp. Our current information is that it will be one like the weekend before and until Wednesday so it will be super cool. People might miss a bit of Depcamp but could go to the CCC camp which is near Berlin and then move over to Depcamp. If that works out, that would be great. More so for international people, we are talking to them. That was the last information. We hope that they will not schedule it on the open weekend. We'll see. There's going to be FrostCon near Cologne. I believe that will be probably afterwards. I believe it will be one weekend later. So if people stick around, it's also a very cool conference. And of course, there's also the Devin UK Barbecue probably also one weekend later, right? So we try to not clash with that either. We would like also again, when we try this year to maybe make it even more official to say please come up with sprints during Depcamp. So Jeff, some concentrated work time. And in general, we would like to open a call for papers in January and try to get a preliminary schedule open up early and also the registrations of people can book flights early. We will see how that works out, but that's the general idea right now to get things early. But of course, we also thought about, we already have it on the plan to have late submissions for talks and not book everything up early so people can come up with cool ideas later on. So generally, that's it. We would like to have more input from locals because nobody from us is right now in Heidelberg. It's not so far away for us. It's not Cape Town. But we already talked to a couple of people from Heidelberg and there are some volunteers, but we could still use more. We could use more people from university especially because Heidelberg University is quite a big one. And if there could be some cooperation, that would be great. We're still looking for ideas for day trips. We have a couple of ideas already, but if somebody has one. And yeah, we're looking also for the sponsorship team to raise the money. So yeah, we hope to see everybody in Debcombe15 in Heidelberg. That's the website. It should be up now. Take a look. It's not much on it yet, but it's there. And we will switch our mailing list now to Debcombe15. So we used Debcombe15 team before. This is not working. And, well, we will also switch the GIC channel, I think. So we had a local channel until now, but now the organization will go to the global team and the global channel. And that's it from us. I think we're almost over time. So if there's any more questions, actually we have time for a couple of questions, I think. So go a while. Okay, that's the new webpage. Yeah. That's the view from the castle. Change channel. Not quite done yet, but... Yes. I feel fairly confident everybody in the room will agree with me when I say this looks awesome. Thanks very much for your work so far. Clearly there's a lot more to come. You're all aware of that. But this looks like a great plan. Thank you very much.