 It's a good morning. For the fewer people we have, the more interactive we can do it. It's not the worst case for me. I already had just one in the audience, so it was really a nice interactive talk. For the people who know me, you know that I say good morning all the time. For the people who don't know me, I'm Mario from Switzerland. I organize since a bit more than seven years around our meetings that's a meeting in the middle of nowhere in the Swiss Alps. Actually, it's not geographically, it's quite in the middle of Europe and we are close to the Italian border. We are in the French part and we speak German there, but when we have the hacking meetings, we speak English there. So it's quite, not in the middle of nowhere. Let's, if you have read the intro text about this presentation, it's a bit about historical review of what we did in Rwanda for the last seven or eight years and a thing for you to motivate to organize sprints yourself. We had last year a nice discussion around at the Rwanda meetings. We made a short book about how to organize sprints. There's a thing in KDE that in the recent years we had fewer sprints during the years and I think it would be something that would be really nice if we have more sprints in the future. So in general, in the following 25 or 20 minutes, if you have any questions or if you have anything to tell, please do it during the talk and don't wait till the end of the talk. Okay, how it started. Rwanda meetings are quite big so I would propose start small, grow step by step every year a bit more or stay stable, that's quite okay as well. I think personally two people for a weekend working on some KDE or free software stuff are already a sprint. Doesn't need to be just about code, you can write some documentation, you can do some artwork, you can do other stuff. Promo work is important as well, communicational stuff, do it and get some people invited to your place. It's already a sprint. In between my slides with some tips about how to do sprints and what to look for, you will find some pictures of recent Rwanda meetings. I hope I didn't pick too many embarrassing pictures. We see here first version of the Rwanda meetings back then it was, actually it started this way. I used KDE software, free software for quite some time and I wanted to give something back. I studied computer sciences in my minor but I don't think I'm the best developer and don't write the most brilliant code so I searched another way to give something back and I tried it with the desktop I used. So I got in contact with the Plasma people. You see the Plasma founder Aaron Saigo is there and a lot of other people who are, meanwhile some of them might, meanwhile disappeared, some came back. David Edmundson is missing, for example, I think there still. And I got in contact with them and I proposed to them, hey guys, you could come to my place. I have a nice holiday house in the middle of the Swiss Alps and I would cook for you. I would give you some electricity. I tried to find some internet connectivity there and you have some places to sleep. Why don't you come there and hack there a bit? And after I think half a year or a year, finally the occasion came and we found a date that fitted for everybody and the people arrived in Randall and everything started. You see it's quite small. You don't see our Charlotte as a holiday house there but we had around 20 people in a house that normally you have four to six people there regularly. We had another flat nearby where some of the people slept and we ate together, I cooked for them. Everybody, almost everybody did a bread during this week. If you look close, that's the former Plasma logo there. And you see Aaron working there. That was the living room during the week, mostly crowded, that's that. My job was mostly, as I said, cooking and from time to time I needed to go downstairs and reinsert the fuse. What's quite nice in Randall is, as I said, it's in the middle of nowhere but you can have a lot of relaxing time. You can do some nice hiking. You can do some dam building together in the rivers although I told these guys don't do it there because it's dangerous. And actually, I think five minutes after they came the top of the bed, the water came. So it was lucky that we still have Plasma. That was the first version and we had some visitors there as well. Miriam and Morg from Amorok were back then there and thought it's nice we could do something the next year as well. It worked really well. It was really inspiring and really productive there but when my parents saw their living room they told me, okay, Miriam, once and never again. So we needed to find a bigger house. In general, if you want to do a sprint logical, one of the logical first steps is choose a topic, something that interests you. In free software development, you mostly say search an itch you want to scratch or a project you use very often or a project, of course, doesn't seem, doesn't need to be like for me that you're not yet involved in a project, you can already be involved in a project and then you just search other people who are interested in this topic and you find a place and a time where you meet. So this was too many slides. That was the second version of the Rondam meetings what's the first time in the big house. It's actually the biggest house in town, even bigger than the church which are mostly the biggest buildings in town. It's quite an old building and it's amazing how many people of Europe were already there in their childhood. A lot of classes were there. We could use it. We rented it for a week. We had back then and actually this year it was a good friend of mine who's a professional chef who cooked for us. We've mostly, the area there is famous for their good nice weather and we had time for a barbecue there as well. This mountain some of you might recognize is the Matterhorn. Nobody knows or nobody outside the KDE and free software community knows about Rondards. It has less than 400 people there but there's a very famous tourist city nearby that's Sermot with the Matterhorn. Very touristy means, very expensive as well. So we mostly make a short travel there but I think we can afford it here but we can't really afford to go to Sermot for such meetings. This house is really nice. It has a capacity of up to 100 people which we don't want to reach. We had of around between 40 and 60 people in the last years which is quite nice. We have still space in the house for the case. It's raining where you can go to other rooms where we have the possibility to go a bit away. We have a big room under the roof there where mostly the people are. Back then I don't know if you see it very well that was the internet connection that year. So we tried to find out if DSL is working there and we were ripping off of the cables out of the walls and it worked okay for the week. As I said, we always, if you live for a week under the same roof, eat under the same roof, hack under the same roof, all the time you need some hours to go out and do something else and thus we always have a social event. When we go to Sermot later we went there to watch closely the, or not so closely the motorhorn if the clouds were not there or we offered for the people who wanted it a hike back for like three hours. And people really liked it, I think. In the first year we had multimedia and EDU, educational people there and I think multimedia is somehow a meanwhile part of the infrastructure of the rundown meetings. That's the thing you need as well. I mean, you need a place. It depends on the size you organize. You need some kind of infrastructure, the electricity of course, internet connectivity, food. I mean, most of the sprints are organized the way that people stay. That's the next one, accommodation. At a place, at a hotel or a hostel nearby. There's not everything under one roof. And then you don't really need to care about food or restaurants nearby. If you are in the middle of nowhere you need to have somebody who cooks. And you need to get the people there. But that's mostly not a problem to find somebody interested. There we see the rundown meetings in the year 2011. In the background you see a picture with some drilling machines. That was the year when we decided at the former year I didn't find a picture. We had a lot of cables hanging through the staircase. So not just the internet connection was quite dangerous to walk by. But we wanted to fix this and as we saw that the rundown meetings become, make sense. People like to come there and we probably will continue for some more years. We asked the owners of the house if they'd like to provide us the hardware and we would wire the house for them. That means some months before the rundown meetings what happened, I organized. There's a smaller one, quite big drilling machines with a ruler like this one because the walls, as I said, house is 150 years old. We need to drill quite big holes. It was an experience I'd like to have only one in my life. But that one is now that we have the whole house wired. We have Wi-Fi through the house. We have ethernet connections in the house and I just need to push a button in theory. What can happen in Rondard? There's always the question before the new participants come to Rondard. What's the temperature like? So that's the weather on the 1st of June there, normally summer, but that can happen. So we had really five centimeters of snow for like two hours on this day. Under the roof, we started then as well that if you have, that's a thing of the rundown meetings as well, we have mostly different groups there. Some of them work more in parallel but we tried to use those energies that people tell each other what they are doing. So we always tried to avoid that people go home and realize, hey, this guy would have been there. David Ford could have fixed my buck. Why didn't I ask him? So we have different presentations up in the big room and since something like two or three years ago, we record them as well so that people outside can watch them afterwards as well. And if you're ever nearby this house which won't probably happen until you come to the rundown meetings, you can use the wifi for free. So legal matters, that's the story you wanted me. By the way, there's the president of our association and we or I searched some people who found an association for the rundown meetings simply because I wanted to get some legal responsibilities for my shoulders. That was the time, around this time, I first met my wife, meanwhile we have two kids. So my responsibilities and life changed a bit. That was the year in 2012, I think, when we had at first 20 people from India who wanted to come. So I was used to invite them, write them, people who need a visa invite them so they had a simpler procedure to get their visa and then one day I got a call from the embassy of Mumbai and they called me, hey, what's rundown meetings? What are you doing there? Why do you invite people? Are you aware that you're responsible for every person 30,000 euros if they disappear in Switzerland or Europe? And then I started to count, okay, 600,000. It's not my normal budget. I think a year before, it already started in a more positive way that we got the biggest Swiss telecommunication company, Swisscom, that sponsored us quite an amount of money. All the money went through my personal account, which yeah, I'm mostly a trustworthy person, but I prefer if the amount's raised that somebody takes an eye on it. And so in 2012, we founded the Rondown Meetings Association, which is by the way now a community partner of KDEV. We will announce it soon in the next days. So in general, to go back to the smaller sprints that you will organize, I think mostly it's not a problem legally that you should worry. I mean, you can have people that need a visa but KDEV will help you. They have quite an experience in it. They can write the invitation letters. We have some experience now as well. Simon did it for quite some years and there is help all over the place. And I mean, the great Kenny who does a lot of organizational stuff for KDEV can share his experience as well. That's 2012. The participation rate was more or less stable. I think 2011 was still now the biggest one. There was the platform 11 Sprint, which is now known as KDE Frameworks 5. A lot of it was done in Rondown. What's mostly interesting is to see how the groups work there in Rondown. I mean, different groups have different styles on working. Normally, we as the organizers don't push any directions on this. So we just offer the infrastructure that people can use it and organize themself. But it's interesting to see groups that, in the worst case, and that happens almost never, people are sitting right beside each other and still do IRC, although they are face-to-face there. But mostly you see people really using the infrastructure. So they are discussing using post-dates and doing Kanban style discussions. Then split up in groups, use the rooms that we have there, go outside without the computers, just do a hike, get some inspiration, come back in the evening, probably they do some coding and there's really amazing work going on. I always say people outside that are really finding astonishing how their own motivation and the will to spare their free time. It's amazing how much work gets done. And it's somehow sad to see, somehow satisfying to see that people leave Rondown not relaxed, but they need another week of holidays to get back to a new energy. Here we see, back then, that was the accessibility group. I think this guy was from GNOME. So we tried to bring other projects to Rondown as well. I mean, the problem or not problem from my side is that I have the best connections in KD. I know most people, but I always try to bring other people. I mean, the KD accessibility group had great contact with the GNOME accessibility guys. I think the year before, we had some GNOME guys as well. Videolan with Sean Baptiste-Kempf was there already. And I heard that Adrian is trying to bring some more other projects to Rondown and some more work for us there, which is good. Financial matters. Mostly, you have some costs in some way. I think at the start, if you're not some local people of the same country, you will have costs like bringing people to your country, which is a place as well, where KDEV helps quite a lot and is amazing, at least from my experience. We are always at a good connection with KDEV, KDEV board, to solve these problems and get people to the country. Other stuff can be that you don't want to spend your own food reserves and want some money for the food. And I think that's something that KDEV can help you if you need help, but the further you go with your sprint, the more often you organize it, you will find local supporters. You can tell companies in the local area. You should use local newspaper radio to tell people about what's happening there. Mostly, there are at least a few people who are interested. In Rondown, we tried it with Open Day in the recent years that people could come to our house for a day and take a look over our shoulder and see what we're doing there and why do people from Brazil to Peru and India come for a whole week to Rondown and bring 50 more people to a population of 350. That's 2014. You might see some people you recognize, some other people we had that was the year, I think, with most of the families there. What we, at least I heard from people coming to Rondown, people who finished their studies at universities started to work, they needed to decide between should I go to a KDEV sprint or should I spend the time with my family on summer holidays? And that was something I thought I could solve there somehow because it's a nice place for families there as well. So why don't these people bring their families along with them? And that worked quite well. I mean, I brought my family there as well. I need to produce some more helpers. And there were quite some people over the recent years who brought their family with them. And as I said, we don't fool, fill the house. During the week, we always have some rooms free. And of course, KDEV doesn't pay their travel or their stay there, but compared to Cermet or other places in Switzerland, we can offer quite cheap accommodation and food there. And I think from the feedback, people liked it. And below you see, I think that was the first year that Bruno Kudwa from Chakampri was there and he did some life testing with my son, who really liked it. For me, and I think in general, if you like to do organizing, it's really fun and joy of organizing because you have to do so many different things. I mean, in Randall, it's actually, I do a hotel for a week. I do everything from taking care of the toilets, see that the chef is doing some food to internet connectivity stuff, see that people arrive, see that people find contact there and see that people find their way back home. So it's really quite diverse what you're doing there. But nonetheless, it's a lot of work and further your event will grow the more work there is. But it's another thing. I think it's very important to keep the fun and joy in organizing this. Take a look at yourself, take care of yourself. Maybe if it's too much or I didn't tell, there was one year in this. The first round of meetings were in 2009. So we had the opportunity, if you count back, to do eight round of meetings in 2013. I personally needed to cancel it because my wife had an accident where she needed quite some rehab during the year. Everything went fine, but I just didn't have time and I didn't want to spend, I couldn't spend time on it. So take a year off and then you will value it even more the next year. But take a look at you, take an eye on yourself and see that you don't burn out but I think there's a general rule in development as well not just in organizing sprints. This was last year, similar group. Konke is still there with the little one as well. There you see a nice picture of the Canadian life people who got contact with, I think, that guy from the visual design group where they do some review of the user interface. On the other side you see some visitors who are playing with Chacompre trying out new stuff and are probably, at least these kids came back almost every year, some new KDE software users who come there. There you see another distraction we offered during the week and today I got a new idea for another more sportive distraction during the year, distraction. That's a puzzle we always have there on a table. That's mostly a puzzle between 1,000 and 1,500 pieces. It's the group picture from the year before so we always try or people can do it between compiling or this kind of stuff to do this puzzle and finish it. And there were years we could finish it and there were years where it didn't work. I didn't do a study about if it correlates with the success of the meeting but people seem to like it and that's a nice picture about different groups that are there who talk with each other, Miriam, Schiel and Olivier from different groups that talk about common problems or common things. So I think in general it's work you do to facilitate work other people can do and motivate them so if you offer them a great environment doesn't need to be the middle of nowhere. People will come if you're welcoming and Katie in general is, in my opinion, very welcoming. People can be very, very productive there and it's still a pleasure to offer the week to different free software hackers and hackers. So that's last year. As I told you we have quite a lot of rooms there so last year people decided to use another big room. Morbile guys are meanwhile, I think that's mostly the occasion where Morbile mentors and Morbile Google Summer of Code students meet each other the first time but Morbile is meanwhile something like infrastructure of the Rondon meetings as well. They are there almost every year. Torsten mostly sometimes it matches by coincidence that the moon face is the right one and he brings his telescope. So you can go outside and enjoy the clear sky which you have on the mountains and see some stars there as well and there you see the people standing politely in a row to get their food which of course people need to get more energy to work again. What we don't see here is, I mean, Switzerland is quite famous for chocolate and we tried, my personal goal is that people leave with at least two kilos more each and for people who were there they know why and we make several chocolate rounds during the day and people should have beneath the beer enough energy to coat like crazy. So thanks for listening. Are there any questions? For the case not I'm still here until tomorrow something after noon. Yeah, that's it for myself. Yes? You have themes, meanings, how do you get themes every year? Yeah, the question is I think the meetings, how do I get to the themes or topics of the meeting? At first it was mostly that I picked the groups that wrote my software. I mean Plasma, I used it. Then other groups learned about the rundown meetings and wanted to join as well. I mean we have this infrastructure ready, it doesn't matter if 10 more people are there or not and in the recent years I or we, people in KDE started to talk with each other what could be a good topic, what are we doing right now? I mean a year or two ago we had been touched to KDE. There was a lot of communication between the different groups and we thought let's make a common theme, that's how we selected the themes. But we're always open as I said to other groups as well, we have the infrastructure there or to other ideas. I always never say no. Yeah, yeah, we had one year the book sprint there where we worked well that the coders and their documentation writers were sitting side by side. Is that it? Yeah. Any other questions? Okay, thank you. This was the last talk in this room as I was informed, so let's clean it up.