 So before I've got a few slides as an introduction before presentations from BitTimes can we first of all know reveal who is here from a BitTime or what BitTimes exist so can we can you shout out who you are for representing the one thing Cape Town Montreal anyone else any last minute bids coming in ah ha ha and Paris is on its way see some local okay so we can say we'll do that at the end of slides it makes it more amusing yeah yeah you can help me with that because I'm really confused so shall I just start anyway yeah so let's start because I'm parsley they probably can figure out what's happening anyway so most information to do with the debcom of bids or debcom 16 information is on the debcom 16 wiki page so I guess lots of you have your laptops and you can go on there and start adding alternative alternative bids or whatever you want to do it's a wiki it has links to various useful information are just very quickly running through a couple of things now this is the debcom of goals which are given in more detail on the debcom of website so if you're thinking of doing a bit you should read the full version of these not just the headings and think about that as you prepare your well as you continue to prepare your bids we when we when we agreed these a few years ago we split things into primary goals which were to enable face-to-face interactions but also importantly providing talks and video lots of people can't make it to debcom we still want to serve them and providing time to work on debion and then we gave a secondary goals so they're kind of important but not what completely decides things in the first place to motivate contributors and to motivate the local community in the place where we hold debcom of in extremely brief version the since we have three presentations to come the debcom of bid process which you can find in extreme detail linked from the wiki page is that later this year sometime to be agreed we would have more more official submission of the bids in some kind of document form and that's normally documents on the wiki rather than anything else following that once we move forward we have a first meeting where we talk to the bid teams and agree stuff and then some amount of time later again this is all varies a bit from year to year depending what we try to push we have an actual meeting when make a decision and in that meeting we can either just decide someone is obviously the winner or we if it's somehow there's a kind of half the people each way then there's a group of people who will make a final decision on that who are the people called the debcom committee I believe some of them are in this room maybe the debcom committee people can embarrass themselves by standing up for a moment or waving or something Marga says no but that's probably tells you she's one of them I don't know who else we have in here from here well yeah another one debcom chairs are kind of automatically debcom committee then yeah Tiago here and there's again you can find the full list on the wiki I won't bore you by going through everything just now again if you are from a bid team you should speak to us or speak to the relevant parts of Debian on things that you need for that one of the bids I know already has set up a bid mailing list yeah on yeah a a boring point to mention for those of you not yet involved as we are migrating the debcom lists to lists dot debion org so if you're create if you want a new list then just behave like you normally would for a debion lists don't do anything strange and the debcom wiki you can probably find and debcom for RC channels are a kind of our regular way of communication as in much of the Debian project for non-official kind of stuff so if you just want to ask a question sure you can email debcom team for example and ask it but you can also jump on to IRC and see if someone's around just to have a chat at the time so not delaying things further and let's have the prep bid presentation so we are we just agreed a method of deciding the order of the bids presentations which obviously is the most important thing so we're going to put the bids alphabetically which means Cape Town Montreal and Paris we believe and we will toss a coin twice and generate four bits or sorry two bits from this if it is if the answer is tails tails we will discard it and retoss so give me a moment here so we have tails first and tails again so we retoss heads and tails so that's this so that's the second second bed which was Montreolle yes so the the format is ten minutes for each bid to talk and explain their bid please so ten minutes for each bid one after the other and at the end we will have questions and answers we cannot delay this much as you can imagine because it's another talk that my people some people might want to see later those below your ear I don't know how yeah anyway doesn't really matter so I'm here to kind of generate interest on having debconf in Montreal and I realize that for some people that may be a bit scary yeah where is yeah it's just I don't know what to do show me I think this way oh this way all right the problem is not really that but the speaker where the speaker is awesome yay so I still I think I'd save you from from that and maybe we could just still do it and around the same time as this year so Montreal lots of food and drink it's totally not an issue most things are walking distance it's it's a pretty small island it well small it's big but it's still things are still within luck local distance there's many options for accommodation one of the some of the things that I looked into were you cam and actually University Residence and there is a vibrant free software community so this is actually one of the places I thought about and I've actually reached out quickly to the you can people and there they would be interested in having debconf there so basically you can it's the University of Quebec Amoreal centrally located this is directly downtown the venue is accessible like I said great food great good network we have a local archive craft beers nearby like seconds away literally one interesting thing is assuming there'd be bad weather it doesn't mean we actually have to go outside in the big blue room and other venues are possible I know about the Crimson the center for computer science research in Montreal and that's also a very nice location and there are possibly others so as for maybe having fun in Montreal there's lots of things rental bikes assuming they don't go bankrupt before that Mount Royal which is a very nice place right in the center of Montreal botanical garden the natural museums like planetarium and sectarian everything and shows and festivals because assuming that comfort happen again around the same time as right now that's right after the festivals there's still lots of things going on it's a lot of fun there's always activities outside and then other cool places St. Helene Island where there's a beach team park and again shows and festivals outdoors so that's basically bike paths on the Montreal islands a view of the Mon Royal and the view of the botanical garden thank you yeah so Paris is the next one then it's red so hi everyone and thanks for being here for the bits from the French cabaret so we actually have a rock-solid local team we have a French trusted organization and in the past six years we did three successful mini-dead comp in 2010 2012 and 2014 so obviously we need to do something in 2016 so let's look at some venue options we can go into Corsica so this is the venue right here we can go in Lyon but Luca had that idea so you should ask him for the details we can also go to Tunisia we have a secret cunning plan but well to be more realistic we can go to the Paris suburbs yeah this is the venue so what are the good things about Paris well the location location location you love the people you love the language you see me the row you see me the grave and more importantly you love the bubble so we have a plethora of potential sponsors in Paris Mozilla EDF Evolyx logilab yeah actually we have credit if to Michael said yes sure we have smile we have in Rio we have the Ildeau France region we have well an incubator and we have the mérite de Paris for the day trip we do have a few options cheese wine well we know a bit about those two what else well there is no French cabaret maybe so the question was can we have it at the same time at the as the Tour de France I guess maybe but wait seriously we really have some venue options basically we have universities or conference centers where we have contacts and we really have a local team I mean the two masterminds are here maybe and myself and we have a lot of volunteers from past mini-debcons and other free software related events also we have a whip and that's it so that's it for our presentation so now the bit from Cape Town all the spectrum is flat say no red light means flat oh that's not right turn it around no there was a was the right way up doesn't go upside down there's something like that okay so there've been a few of us in Cape Town talking about hosting a debcon for a while it's been mostly idle discussion because we thought it'd be a nice thing to do and we thought people might like to come to Cape Town but we've been we put it in a bit last year and we never actually took it to completion so maybe we can do that this year first reason why we need to do it is because people keep asking whenever I introduced myself where I'm from it's obvious that when is Debcon gonna be in Cape Town we haven't had a debcon from Africa yet I think it's probably about time there are only five DD's in Africa but we can work on that sorry I'm sure we think Cape Town's very beautiful it's got a lot of free software and Debian people in it and it's very nice it's a cheap place to go out and drink and eat and enjoy life obviously it'll be good for free software in Cape Town there are few reasons why you might not want to have a debcon from Cape Town it's a bit of a pain to get there but that same goes for us whenever we try to go anyway so maybe it's a fair response yes there are three DD's in South Africa and I'm not in South Africa anymore so two but maybe this will help usually Debcon is around this time of year which is winter and unfortunately winter in Cape Town isn't that nice but if you get a nice week it'll be great there's no way of predicting that at all there is some crime but I wouldn't worry about that we'll have them come out of the way somewhere probably and public transport in the city isn't fantastic but thanks to the World Cup we now have a bus system that's pretty good in the city if we outside of the city it'll it's going to be a lot more taxis and hired cars I'm afraid but this is Africa yeah we've had some ideas of where we could host a debcon there is a very small little Institute of Mathematical Studies that could take about a hundred people on the coast they're probably too small but they have already said they would happily take it debcon there's the university the Cape Town University which you can see in the background here which is a spectacular campus with a great view but it's a big university and very bureaucratic the chance of getting unimpeded access to the network and dorm rooms when the students haven't been kicked out of them is fairly small otherwise maybe we go to a small university town about 80 kilometers out of Cape Town in the Wainlands if we we have some contacts there if we can do that that might be the best option that that would mean residents and drinking places and conference venues within walking distance of each other people Allison and I are both here and supporting the bird but neither of us actually live in Cape Town right now I'm just moving away from Cape Town there are a bunch of people in Cape Town who are keen just how keen remains to be seen but at least one of them has experience with running conferences and I think we can do something potential sponsors Amazon and Oracle are both throwing money at everything they possibly can in Cape Town at the moment to try and hire people if you don't know EC2 was started in Cape Town and they're now the biggest employee among geeks there by a mile but they're people art so maybe a couple yeah Oracle and pray and pray cult has been sponsoring lots of open-source related things like by concert a there are lots of nice things to do you can see Robin Island in the distance that's well worth a visit it's got penguins a fantastic amount of hiking game reserves around Cape Town not so great you might see a giraffe if you're lucky and some tortoises beach with penguins and wine wine farms we come show we can think of more great things to do as well wine farms time of year would be a big consideration it's kind of rainy from July to November on and off winter in Cape Town is cold and wet and no one has heating so it's cold and miserable what cold means about eight degrees Celsius but the rain goes sideways it's less than pleasant in the end say February it's very hot and dry but it's probably a bad time for debcon because it would be too close to another debcon and it's tourist season so you'd have to compete with Germans for beaches so maybe we just take our luck and see what we can what the weather is like any questions okay no questions so can the teams now come forward so we can they can take questions from the audience please first question for the Paris team of course debcon 15 is going to be next year in Heidelberg and the traditional pattern is that we try to alternate continents and move it around between regions from year to year rather than doing it on the same continent twice what would you argue is the reason that we should break from this pattern and do it in Paris as opposed to skipping Paris for 16 and having you reapply for 17 if I'm not mistaken on the wiki there is also a bit for Pag but I don't know if there would be any official proposal for it or not about the question for 16 or 17 yeah we could we just made the proposal because Nikola and me were have some time to organize the conference we are not sure to have this time for later on we have most of the volunteers we have with the iron purse so that's why the city makes most of us and to complete the answer the pattern didn't actually exist between debcon zero and debcon one I know that's low which also means that France is already over quota right from the Montreal bid there was an important piece of missing information which was the team could you please go into who do you think that would be helping you sure to be honest this is kind of my own initiative but at the same time I did approach a lot of people there's a few DD's in Montreal already I know Anarchat he's somewhat interested in helping out I know Chagot and Tassia might help out as well and there's so I mean there's a lot of people who are definitely interested in helping out I myself I'm I mean I'm not a DD but I I do have time and I'm from Montreal and I can do most of the stuff and I have contacts with University people the I know the the local computer science club is extremely interested in this and I also have help from other people like John Scherger and others so yeah the more important question for the Montreal bid where would we go on the day trip that's one of the things I tried to show that so I mean Montreal is absolutely awesome I know a few other places for like pretty interesting hiking I don't think it's quite the same as what I heard the the hiking was this time but there's Mount Saint-Hilaire there's like very very nice place Mount Saint-Hilaire for instance is a is a big park that's owned by McGill and is close enough that we can reach it fairly easily okay well for the three of the bids we up up to this year we usually have a two week a complete conference and well we will have to see what happens from next year onwards what duration of a depth comp are you considering I mean are you proposing holding a week of the camp or a this format we try this time I do know the previous format actually I would I think this format worked quite well and I well at least my own opinion is that this would work that would still work very well for Montreal I'd be perfectly fine with either format I haven't really considered that too much so yeah that's basically the same for us we'd be fine with the two formats I guess depending on the venue and the money we could extend to further than 10 days but I mean it's to be defined basically I was curious specifically for the Cape Town bid what are the entry requirements for the country or generally how difficult is it for people all over the world to enter the country legally as a visitor illegally is fairly straightforward I'm led to believe legally is fairly simple too for many countries you can come with a tourist visa that you can get on entry I think I'm sorry so I've been there many times as an American you get a pretty much an automatic three month entry visa and it's a pretty it's a long list of countries that have that access they are a little bit concerned about the neighboring African countries so they make it harder for entry from there because they're afraid people are going to come in and stay illegally but for most of the world they're they're very familiar with people coming as tourists and that's what they expect so they don't have very heavy restrictions there if we got any support from local government that would probably help with the neighboring countries as well who was first question for Cape Town I believe there's South African Airlines yeah do you think that you could establish contact with them and get them to sponsor because if we have 10 plus hours that also means a lot more money for us to fly in so that if South African Airlines can stay a float long enough I have no I have no idea I don't have any contacts in the airline industry I don't think anyone else does either yeah there are several other airlines and fly to South Africa as well if I'm allowed I'd like to ask a couple of questions to all the teams which I will stack here quickly because I think they're important to have everybody's answers to first of all how flexible are each of your proposals in terms of the date ranges for your target venues and secondly I at least I remember two of the teams listed prospective sponsors that have some local influence and it's possible that all three of them did but we found certainly this year in doing DEBCOM 14 that personal connections make a big difference for for raising sponsorships and so to what degree do you view these as as strong prospects because you have you have someone you know to talk to versus them just being large companies doing open source in the area I think as I'm holding the microphone I'll start by answering that we our venues are still so up in the air and the proposal is so vague that dates are variable we have contacts at some of the well the companies I mentioned I got contacts at all of them I probably could probably get sponsorship and I assumed that comes usual sponsors would also sponsor I'd say I agree with the like usual sponsors that would most likely very much work I know we have we have an office of Google in Montreal and I think we have some contacts there and we I mean at least in the computer science club at UCAM there's all the people with contacts and various free software companies so yeah the dates well for most of the summer it's pretty much fine so basically I don't know anytime end of June until about this time after that it becomes a bit more of a problem because classes will start again so I guess from the for the Paris bid the well it's maybe we don't know the people that can influence the sponsorship decisions but we know the people that know the people so it's not too far I mean it would be I think pretty pretty fair to find out yeah to be more precise the companies we listed in our bid are known to support such conferences and they've already have in France actually and you have contacts in many of them so we do expect at least some attention from them so to such conferences and regarding the dates I guess yeah guarding the dates I mean it would think depends on the venues we didn't explore deeply each possibility yet but as we identified mostly universities for now it will be during the summer it should be okay because many dorms will be almost empty so we'll have more possibilities yeah so question to Cape Town you mentioned that the timing might be difficult whether and stuff did you consider having maybe many depth confers to figure out how that would work and maybe you could have it in at a date which is not clashing with that come so much so our plans after our failure to get a bit in last day come forward to have a mini debcon the difficulty is there I don't think there enough people in the region to have a mini debcon that's specifically about Debian and they're already a large number of local conferences about other software projects we've got I mean all the languages have conferences there are a handful of other conferences so the bit out of the way the question was hosting a Debian team sprint sure but it's good except an expensive place to host a sprints absolutely so looking at actually thinking of costs from all three of the bids I mean how would you rate say accommodation cost locally for you know both for the sponsored type of accommodation in dorms or what ain't if you look at university or for local health hotels I mean what kind of range is it are we talking I don't have numbers on hand University dorms fairly cheap other accommodation as variable as you'd like but not a fairly cheap yeah I can't say very much more than that it's in general Montreal is fairly cheap I know we can get some kind of group discount at a very very great rate as for dorms I know it would be cheap but I seriously have no idea what it is right now I need to look into it so for the university dorms in the venues that we considered I guess the price would be in the range of 150 euros for two weeks something like that maybe less but max 150 euros and for the hotels I don't have any numbers I guess that considering that the venue would be close by to some specific options we could possibly arrange some discounts or group prices maybe well I mean related to the next to last question a several times in the past it has been like a push that's a good thing for them come to be close to an interesting a local big conference a do you think there's some other conference in the time of year I know it's too nebulous right now but some other conference we could either piggyback on or that keep that can piggyback on us right that they can make it drive the prices down or maybe get a wider audience so for price I have no idea so around April May there's scale conf which is a computing you know software at scale conference about two days long and around November there's Picon ZA those are the two I would try and be back to back to either in particular relevant it's kind of too bad that this is for 2016 and not 2015 because I know there was at least Picon in Montreal which could have gone very well with it but otherwise I mean I there's lots of conferences in the US in Canada I agree there's much fewer but it's something to look into any other questions so slightly more silly question maybe or maybe not depending on your point of view what's the local beer like all right well we have lots of craft beer Montreal is big on getting influence for beer making from various from various locations one of the one of the places I can definitely talk about is the location that's right beside the UCAM they make all their own they make all their own beers they have stout every every kind of beer you could think of and another good place is well or well-known place at least in Quebec is the bistro de bière belge I'm not sure they could actually accommodate something as big as debcoff but it's something to that I could definitely look into and they have such a great choice of beers but yeah so if you'd asked me ten years ago I would have said that's feedback I would have said it's absolutely awful but craft beer has been taking off in Cape Town in the last five years especially and especially especially amongst developers and free software people a lot of brewers so there's one commercial brewer who would be vaguely involved in the bid team and I'm sure he'd be interested in providing beer he brews Belgian style beers so in France I guess the good local beer is wine so if you really need the bubbly stuff I guess we are close enough from Belgium to get some beers well I think that's it we have a few breweries near Paris nothing really significant we have seven minutes left so certainly after organizing debcoff seven and seeing Gunnar after debcoff six the probably I think the thing that's most underestimated is the amount of time it takes for one person to do debcoff I certainly almost lost my job over it I know some other people it had been certainly lost their partners or something as they left them because they're spending too much time doing debcoff how much time do you do you think you have to do and how much time do you think it will take this is where I feel particularly bad except just left Cape Town so it would probably be mostly on other people's shoulders I would know I would commit as much time as I could to it and I could imagine that being a good I don't know what I should say on a live stream but a couple of days a week at the most but it would it would require other people who are actually there to be doing that as well to succeed sorry same team so I I've been for many years switching back and forth between Cape Town and the US so I would take this as an excuse to spend about half my time in Cape Town that year and I do know what conference organization takes I did ask on before I did debcoff yes we can go so yeah I don't think we underestimate the amount of time that it takes I mean since we since we emitted the idea of doing debcoff in France a lot of people have told us you're crazy you shouldn't do it never do it it's not a good idea but well I guess in France we are lucky to have a lot of days from work and yeah I guess for going weekends for two years is not that bad and after organizing the three minute debcoffs we we've seen that there are many volunteers who can dedicate some time for organizing conferences and I think we can count on them to so I agree I don't actually have any experience in making that kind of big event but I mean I have been carefully reorganizing my time and I know I could very easily spend at least 20 hours a week just dedicated to debcoff and then with the amount of interest and help that I expect that I see well with the amount of interest that I see in Montreal and of help that I know I can expect from some people I'm sure it can be pretty easily split up and with my 20 hours and a bit of help is doable related follow-up question and without getting into specific details on any particular organizer's relationship status but to the extent that the primary organizers of each of these bids has a significant other to what extent are those significant others on board with this plan so she's aware of it and she said cool and usually she's you and yeah we're usually pretty pretty much together on these kinds of crazy ideas so good being a single makes us really easy agreed she's not aware of it yet we had twins two years ago so I don't expect any help from her to be honest any closing question marking so I think Stefano for Cape Town has already done a fair job of listing all the negative points really good sales job there what about the other bids Paris and Montreal what do you think of the downsides of each of your your of your bids I agree I'm largely inexperienced in these kind of big events and I can't really account for although I know for instance Jagon Tessia did mention that they could help but not drive the show if you will and I know that most of the other people have approach who are interested also don't have a lot of experience so I'd say that's that's definitely there's definitely a learning curve so I think one of the main cons for Paris is the price which would be probably steep I guess that if the Swiss team managed it we can and another issue that could be in Paris is that it's so easily reachable that it could become too big so this is something we have to take into account when looking for venues because well we need to plan for capacity there was another downside I didn't mention which is thank you so no so large venues with net with decent internet are hard to find so academic institutions have good bandwidth other large venues might have a formic DSL line and think that's really good internet connectivity this it's difficult