 Hello everyone. This next talk will be about DevConf 10. This is Holger. Please crouch if you're going to pass in front of the camera. If you want to ask any questions, please ask for the microphone first. Say your name and while you're talking, please look to the camera and smile. Hi. My name is Holger Liebsen and I will actually not give a talk today but rather, it's very short, very few slides about why we do DevConf, how we decide on a venue and then the idea is that if people are here who made proposals that they present them shortly. And that what we do today here is that we define a timeline until we want to decide where DevConf 10 is held. Yeah, that's what I just said. Yeah, the timeline basically is the deadline until we want to have the proposals finished, the deadline to find the decision and the deadline for defining the decision process. So why do we do DevConf? For many reasons, obviously. There's not a single one. They are somewhat ordered by priority. The first and most priority is to get work done on Debian together. It's also the other main goal of DevConf is to educate each ourselves with talks and workshops. DevConf should be a chance to meet face to face, to socialize, to party also. Not to party, that's the other thing. To develop social bonds and to brainstorm new ideas. Parties, of course, means to get together and also to improve the motivation of the individuals and the teams. Of course, we also want to boost the local community and to have fun, but that's a bit lesser goals and not really goals because we provide free food and accommodation so that at least the people who work on it get something back from the project. That is all. We wrote that down, I think, in 2006 when we discussed about where DevConf 7 should be held, that we thought that we write down why we do it. It's also on the Wiki and slash why. We have this location checklist with different items which are important to hold. A DevConf that is just copied and paste from the list, except that I changed this special rooms to special Debian conference rooms. We need a server room, we need a place for the video team, we need a front desk, these kind of things. Ah, put again. The location checklist is we need a strong local team that is really important for us. Then the place itself, we need conference facilities, food for quite a big number of people with some special requirements, network connectivity because without network we cannot work. We need a place to sleep for all the attendings and there should also be some fun and free time activities possibly. So it should not be in a complete desert island, whatever. And local sponsors are also a plus. The timeline, I think we should decide a timeline today which we can follow and my suggestion is that we have a deadline for proposals at the end of this year 31st, sent in by mail, documented on the Wiki, whatever. A deadline for the decision should be April 1st, that this is really the deadline but we should aim to make a decision on March 1st so that we have two months to discuss the proposals and then one month to have a, for whatever, flameless site. And we also need to decide how we decide. And I would say we document the procedure until the end of this year also and that the preferred way is rough consensus which was basically the way we choose this location and the next one. And Podepkov 9, not real ones. Okay, this looks so brilliant, we take it. And if that doesn't work, then we use the procedure as we had Podepkov 7 which is basically an ISE meeting with the votes of the involved people and by priority. That is somewhere written and I would like to put it somewhere we can find it again. There has also been, More has started to write down what he learned as doing Depkom 7 as a local team that is in the Wiki and so that we start, we always had pages for a specific Depkom that we start to document the procedures needed for each Depkom. Do you think this timeline makes sense? Do you want to repeat it? Yeah, I was just saying, I guess the timeline decision could also be kind of up to the cities which are interested in having it as to how long they feel that they need to prepare a sensible bed. I mean, if all the cities in question felt that they were ready tomorrow then we could decide earlier possibly. We used, two years ago I think, we wanted to decide two years in advance and we learned that it's too much time and so I proposed this change also. Nobody seems to disagree. Should we take it for the next five years? I don't want to talk about the same thing every year. I think that in any case the decision and everything should not be postponed too much it's really good to start preparing a long time in advance. It's a lot of work so let's not delay it too much. Okay, so this is the timeline for Depkom 10, 11, 12, 13, blah, blah, blah. We can also change it next year again until we decide we want to discuss it again. Wonderful. So as far as I know there are three proposals ordered in alphabetically order by country. I don't know if Gannath wants, yeah, let's start with them I think. I don't know what time is it. Ten minutes past, we have plenty of time basically, fine. But I would say let's keep it maximum ten minutes so that we can have in the end a bit discussion. I think that this was my slide also so there's nothing more. I'm not prepared to have anything here yet. Fine. Boston, New York, San Francisco, Portland, Cambridge, whatever. Washington, Texas. You want the projector? Yeah, you want the projector? That's ten minutes per country, not per city. Hello. While he's doing that, I'm Jimmy Kaplowitz. This is Michael Schulteis, two of the people organizing the New York bid. I'll wait until he gets this fixed. Good. All right. So, yeah. All right. So we propose to hold the Compton in New York City. It's a major world city. It's over eight million residents. A lot of tourists come there from all over the world. You see some numbers there. It's 46 million per year in growing. Easy air access, lots of different airports. There's the three mentioned there, JFK, Newark, and La Guardia, and there's more in nearby cities. Most of the world can get there really cheaply, much more so than a lot of possibilities for debt comp. Cheaply and quickly also from where most debt-being developers live. The currency is relatively weak, so for those who use other currencies, it's a relatively inexpensive place. I see lots of European tourists there every day walking around speaking languages like French and Spanish. So it's pretty quick to get from the airports. Two of them are in New York City, and one of them has public transit that takes you right there in a half an hour. So it's really close. Right. The public transit in New York City is not like the rest of the U.S. The public transit in New York City is a European quality. It runs all the time. It goes everywhere you want to go. It trains and buses run frequently. Much of the subway and many potential venues and places you'd want to go are handicap accessible too. Lots of things going on all hours of the night and day. Places to shop everywhere, places to see for day trips, Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, Park, so forth. English is clearly the language. It's the U.S. There's lots of people who speak Spanish in shops and just generally around. So most people here have some English and some have also Spanish, so you'd be fine. If we go to a non-English-speaking country, that would be kind of eight, nine and ten in a row where those who don't know the local language wouldn't have a language to communicate in, whereas everyone here knows at least some English. Also, there's a very active local community for free and open-source software. There's two different logs and there's PHP and there's Ruby and there's Perl and there's BSD and so forth. I'm sure we can get some of them in, maybe get Evan Moglin to do a keynote or something. So as for where to hold it, certainly housing in New York City is expensive. So we're looking at universities as options. We know people like Biela at NYU. We know people like Evan Moglin at Columbia and we have multiple people involved with local team and Debbie and NYC at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. Also, Brooklyn College hosted a GNOME Summit five years ago, so they seem to be open to this sort of thing. And at least Poly I've heard is quite inexpensive. Someone mentioned like $35 a night per person for a double occupancy dorm room and for New York City, yes, that is cheap. Usually it's in the hundreds of some sort. Lots of options. Wikipedia has a list of about 50 universities and colleges and someone else mentioned that either in the city or not too far outside of it, there are corporate training facilities that companies use for various purposes and that might be suitable for a conference. We probably have people stay in dorms. There's also hostels and for those who want to pay more hotels, we even have one of the hostels mentioned on our Wiki already. And bandwidth is a nice aspect to our bid. We have fast bandwidth. Much of the internet runs through New York. There's lots of great connections. Universities generally have internet 2 and 100 megabit connections available, so it shouldn't be a problem. Everyone is aware that the US is sort of the world's bogeyman right now. Getting into the US is not the easiest, but it's more possible than you might think. Citizens of 28 countries besides the US, including Canada and most of Europe, have a visa to come to the US. Mexicans, I was speaking to one during this conference and apparently they have visas that are valid for 10 years and they don't have to get it for every trip. The processing times for getting a visa for those countries that do require it, very wildly depending on the country, but for most of them they are rather short, such as, as I said, the total process from start to finish can be within a month. And every country where DEBConf is held or will be held has had similar issues with visas and entrance issues for some people in the world. Some people can't make it for financial reasons, travel reasons, immigration reasons. Whether the EU or Argentina or wherever, there's always some of that that happens. People are worried about a few specific issues specific to the US. The Customs and Border Patrol, not the TSA, does the searches for people entering the US and the ability to search your laptop and maybe seize it. The exact details vary from country to country, but it's similar in some other countries. Maybe they can seize it at the border, maybe they can search it and refuse you entry, maybe it can be seized without a court order once you're in. I know some western countries allow the police to send your encryption keys and it's a crime if you refuse. So, I'm not a fan of this policy, but there's similarly stupid policies that affect us all in most countries. As far as security checkpoints go, shortly after September 11th, 2001, people, yes, waited in line for three, four hours for international flights. It was not pretty. Nowadays, I went through my international flight from here. I went through security screening in less than 10 minutes at a major airport in the New York City area. They don't screen citizens separately from non-citizens on the way out for that, so that would apply to you too. The official airline recommendations for an international flight or something arrived maybe an hour and a half early at peak times or even sooner before the flight, you know, less time at other times. It's really not a big deal anymore. They still have stupidities, but they're all very easy to handle. And I've heard a few people mention to me the case of Dmitry Sklyarov, who got arrested coming to the U.S. to present a talk on his e-book cracking software for his Russian company. What a lot of people don't realize is that the U.S. was not actually arresting him for doing this cracking in Russia. The U.S. was arresting him because his company sold this thing which violated U.S. law from U.S. servers on their website, was hosted in the U.S. And so I'm not a fan of this policy either, but it is not a case of the U.S. applying its law to foreigners. It's a case of the U.S. applying its law to people who use resources in the U.S. to violate U.S. law. So if you're not doing that, it shouldn't affect you. Now, we shouldn't count too much on what politicians will do, and I know that, I'm not even disregard, but most likely the new government that will take office after the 2008 election starting in January 2009, there's a reasonable chance, especially if it's, you know, especially if it's Obama, but there's a reasonable chance that they'll institute less harsh policies and things may improve by the time the conference rolls around. I'm not going to say they're going to go back to how they were before President Bush. I'm not going to say they're not going to change at all. They'll probably, you know, vary in unpredictable ways, but overall I expect at least some of this craziness to be rolled back. Some will remain, but don't assume it'll be as bad as it is now, which is already a lot better than September 11th and shortly thereafter. Now, another aspect is lately, you know, DEBCOMF has been in places that are somewhat hard for North Americans to get to, and interest from North Americans has been declining in coming to DEBCOMF. You know, some of them can't spend the money or do the travel or what have you to go to Europe, Asia, South America, but it's much easier to get to New York City, especially for people on the U.S. East Coast, but even for the West Coast people and in between. So this would revitalize U.S. interest in DEBCOMF and probably Canadian too. Once you come to DEBCOMF, you realize how awesome it is and, you know, how great everyone is and what a wonderful experience, and that'll probably make U.S. and Canadian people more likely to come to the rest of the world for future DEBCOMFs. So we already have time's up apparently. We are really near the end. I just have to mention the local team, so I'm not going to read the names then, but we have, as you can see, several experienced people who have experience either in DEBCOMF or at DEBCOMFs or organizing conferences or a mixture. So we definitely have a strong base from which to build. That's it. Jimmy? Hi. Just one quick question. You have the local team there. Sorry about that. You have the local team there. Is there a leader in that team? Right now, no. I mean, I'm the one who's been taking the lead recently in organizing the bid, but we don't have a defined organizational structure. I imagine different people will take the lead in different regards, such as there's a couple of other people who have special connections to Polytechnic University, who have organized conferences there before or who are alums, and we'll probably divide up the roles as appropriate. You've got details about New York. I mean, obviously there's been some discussion already about maybe other cities in the US. Any thoughts about those? Well, as far as I could tell, the pages on the Wiki about Boston and San Francisco were simply parodies of the New York page. They're both very worthwhile cities to hold a conference in and not knocking them, but I'm not aware of any other city in the US where someone has actually prepared a serious bid. If you want to talk about it, that's fine, but I'm not aware of any other serious bid that's been prepared in New York, in the US. New York is better than places like Portland for travel. Boston is good also, so is San Francisco. Those are both not quite as good as New York as far as travel costs. What's cheaper from Europe? Cheaper from Europe, yes. New York is cheaper from Europe. Right, I mean, the first thing I'd suggest is it's possibly worth you and a bunch of the other American D.D.'s if you do want to push a serious bid, actually work out amongst yourselves and start some real discussions. But yeah, thanks for your time anyway. So is someone here from Venezuela? You mentioned a bunch of people in the local team. One experience that we gained by doing debcoff is that you need a tight, united local team. It's not like just list a bunch of people that live in New York. It's not enough. Can you go back to the local team slide, please? I mean, most of these people already know each other and visit each other on an occasion. And I don't... I mean, that's certainly... We're not currently very organized as far as the local team. We do have a lot of experience organizing. And if I'm not mistaken, some past debcons have turned out very successfully with that. We're definitely going to organize quickly if there's an interest. Okay, well, that's not what I meant. First of all, I have to say, he already insulted me on the planet, so I'm not going to disguise it. I really think Listin D'Amog there drops points from you because he didn't help debcon 6. He unhelped, really. He created more work for us who were not local team who had to do the stuff that he didn't do. I took his word for that. I understand. I know. I don't expect you to know this. So I'm telling you, really, unlist him. He's not going to help you. For the other people, well, most of them, the ones I know, yes, we can trust them, but that's not my point. My point is you have to be united. You have to be like a tight group because organizing debcon is very stressful. I understand. And it requires the capacity of trusting on the other person. He's going to do the show and he's going to do it well. If he has a problem, he will fix it or whatever. All right. You can't really do it with scars people distributed and that's, yeah, we know we'll work, but they're not tight group. I think that's a really good point. This is BDL in the back of the room. I think that our goal today should be to sort of listen to the current state of these proposals and some of these things that we're asking as questions and raising as suggestions are things that we would hope the teams take back and use to improve their proposals between now and the end of the year, which I think suggested would be our deadline for accepting submissions. And if there are other teams that are interested, possibly hosting the event that look at the existing proposals, whether they are real or spoof and make some decision that they think they could do a better job or have a better offer, I think we would certainly love to see additional proposals. I certainly think this is an interesting idea. We've talked about it some and it seems like the principle negative on the New York proposal is this concern about the immigration issues and that seems like it's potentially a manageable issue for all of the other characteristics. It seems like for this stage of development of the proposal, like there are some reasonably good thoughts there, I will look forward to seeing this one further develop before the deadline and I do hope we have someone from Venezuela here who can talk about the other proposal as well. So do I. Several people of the Orga team have already opposed to your bid and it is important to me that if we went on a vote today, New York wouldn't be preferred if there are any other serious alternatives. So... Yeah, of course. But I think that the Orga team should generally express the consensus of the whole development developers or interested in DEBCONF anyway. So I'd like to see how many in this room will oppose a DEBCONF in New York. Can I... Okay. This is not a proper statistical sample but I'd like to see a lead poll. Can I make a quick comment about this considering I was the first one to oppose. I'm Martin again. I did not oppose. I told the team that I would have a problem to attend and some other team members said the same thing that they would not be able to be on the Orga team. This, as far as I understand, was not an opposition from the team as a whole, nor from any of its members that was going to happen and I agree with you completely. If you put in your bed for New York City then it needs to be decided on merit rather than ideological whatever is. Thank you for the unheadedness. Well, of course it's natural at this point to start questioning whatever comes to mind and we started already doing the same with other teams that will show their bits questioning maybe seen as the easiest way but I think at this point the only thing we should do is to listen to the expositions and give some months to do the questioning because there are many things that haven't been expressed that haven't been thought out and well, there's too many things still to be thought about so I would say everybody please shut up. I'm happy to yield to Venezuela if they're here. If anyone wants more information they can check out our wiki page which is in the usual location and we use one Creative Commons less image there is the attribution. Thank you. I don't know, this is not my video. Well, good night. First I'm so sorry because my English is so bad maybe I have problem with some words for try to do the presentation when I have problem Marga, help me. Okay. Well, we are the Debian Venezuela team and we are trying to make the proposal for to do the content in Venezuela in Margarita, Iceland Margarita, Iceland is a beautiful place with facility in the wiki we put some question for example Margarita, Iceland is the biggest Iceland in Venezuela is a very, very turic place Margarita have some a lot of facility like international airport a lot of big hotels a lot of computer store and a lot of big small like some big mall is a very big store that is very important because in Margarita for the kind of tourists and all the hotels the people can speak English perfectly and it's not a problem that is important too from the airport to the hotel is almost 30 minutes and all the hotels can provide transportation from the airport to the hotel that is very important too we don't have restriction for computer, we don't have restriction for importation and question please do you have import regulation for cheese please no, we don't have we don't have a regulation for cheese and for example we have regulation for some aspect like the chain because we have official control control the devices we have a control from the exchange money but it's not a problem really because if the people work close with the government with their regulation it's not a problem because we have exchange we have money exchange in all airport in all the first city in Venezuela it's not a problem in the Baja, what else do we have well we have we have we have experience organizing a big event for example the free software Venezuelan community have a lot event like the world world free software world free world free world free knowledge is an event for every year and we have almost 4000 4000 okay and the free free knowledge event and we have almost 2000 2000 3000 people all the years it's a lot it's a lot of work but we have making almost 5 years and all years the Debian community organized to organize the Debian day the other free software community to organize the how to say the the national free software congress with almost 1000 people or years and we have experience organizing events and we have we have in this moment we have a very strong community growing because we have we have we have we have a we have a no no in this moment in Venezuela the free software is used a lot yeah the free software the free software in Venezuela in this moment is very used for all the people for example we have a company named Bit Bit is making almost 1000 computer for every year and 1000 computer every year is is sold with free software is sold with best distribution named that is very important because the free software community is working close but for try to do best distribution for that equipment so when I went to I spent about 6 weeks in Venezuela in 2006 and my experience was that every CBR that I went to ran Microsoft windows I was in Caracas every CBR maybe I went to 15 or 20 I never found one that was running Linux is that changed now CBR is like a locatorio a place that has computers yeah it's not a problem because no no because so it's only the government no because try to change the the culture in the people is not easy okay we have a lot of GRs using Microsoft and the university using Microsoft and try to change the the culture for the people is not easy but in this moment the government in the education have a lot of playing for change that situation and for example the the laboratories school the school laboratories have only free software in elementary and middle school in public schools but in private universities most of them are still Microsoft windows yeah and we think in in in some years the situation will change hello I have another question I've read something about Venezuela and Wikipedia and it was impressive and I've also heard something good but my impression about Venezuela is that it is completely disconnected to the free software world even on this conference you people are quite close you are sitting on one table don't exchange with everybody it is just me there who has this impression or it is a problem I'm just wondering I would like to talk to you but the chances are so low I think this might not be a good position for Debconf hello am I not correct in thinking that Venezuela was one of the four countries that objected to the ISO approval of OOXML is that correct so I think if we're comparing countries and their commitment they were one of the only four that actually objected to it enough to I think if you're comparing how committed to free software people are then Venezuela deserves a round of applause ok I'm Matias Ambrosio and I had the exact opposite relationship here I think I have met every every Venezuelan they were quite open but the US people have been sitting on the same table I tried to approach them and I could not talk to them so I don't think that's the situation perhaps it's some kind of language barrier I didn't feel that way my English is not that bad I have spoken with everybody here but just people I don't think it is a language barrier because in Mexico we got drunk together and here we got drunk together and I don't speak a word of Spanish hi I think it could be quite important to say about the potential reach of a conference in Margarita I've been to Margarita and the reason I went is because it's very easy for people in Amazonas and Ririma to very poor areas in Brazil to travel to Margarita there's an established road the only road actually out of Manaus is going north to Venezuela to Margarita so there could potentially be some quite enthusiastic but very underrepresented people given an opportunity to participate in something like Debconk by a bid from Venezuela and a successful bid from Venezuela I really hope that you guys can get something sorted really well done and that Margarita can be chosen for Debconk 10 so I have a couple of questions one, you didn't mention the internet connectivity and if it's really an island in Venezuela I would be a bit concerned about it another issue is I did a quick look which is not comprehensive by any means and it looks like the only direct flights to this airport are the flights by Condor which is Lufthansa holiday flights and they are probably not that frequent it's the only one I could find so it looks like just a thing to consider that if people are coming from Europe they will most likely have to go through Caracas and yeah, so two questions about it so one is there will be logistical problems with bringing people in through Caracas and how you're going to address that and now there's internet connectivity okay my name is Jose Parrella my nickname is Burial I'm not particularly involved with the organization team but I'm trying to help them with the translation regarding your question about the airport, it's right even if it's international it doesn't receive a particular flight from Europe or the States you have to go through Caracas which is not a big deal since flights are usually quite cheap I believe that you can fly from Caracas to Margarita for around $40 regarding your question about connectivity all of our connections go to which is a national ISP and it's now a state-owned company we'll try to sort out a couple of E1s connections in the island let's see but that's one of the biggest achievements that this team has to do in order to get a depth conf working there but there will be connectivity they're trying to sort out which kind of connectivity we'll have there regarding the OOXML proposal actually we were one of the four countries that made an appeal to the standard and we were the only one that wasn't regarded by the standards committee as a stupid or just plain nuts actually the complete appeal was made by members of the free software community and the national standards body just had to sign it and send it to the standards committee also regarding the fact that we're usually a close team that has part of true and parts that are not true usually since there's a government decree that mandates the use of free and open source software in the country and it has also been spread to the private sector of the economy and the market we have been doing things only in Venezuela and looking only inside Venezuela and maybe looking to some of our friendly countries in the South America continent like maybe Ecuador and maybe even Argentina and Brazil so that's right we have only been doing things inside Venezuela but we try to participate in other events like that we have been going to that comes in Mexico and I believe we are one of the most numerous congregation of people here at Argentina we are almost 20 people here in the conference and in Scotland we had like 15 people and in Mexico we had 16 people so we have been quite consistent with that my name is Lisandro and I started current engineering you said you will need to have at least a couple of E1 connections you will need at least five at least five and each E1 connection in Latin America that hasn't been cheap it hasn't never been cheap so you have to check that in account and you will need at least five of them the team is aware of that and also the standards are between 20 megabit per seconds so the team is aware of that okay we should come to an end with this we should maybe have two more questions but we should close it because we also have some more months to decide it finally and document all this on the wiki so that the questions can be asked on the mailings but Christian have another question I tried to make it short apparently your proposal is based on the fact that in Venezuela you have a strong governmental and institutional support for free software which is obvious to everybody I think is there a possibility that this support changes until 2010 because of political local changes like elections are you looking for the magic crystal boy no not exactly but the general stability okay I don't know he says that the team is working on a proposal without contemplating the possibility of working with the government and the proposal also contemplates that if the government wants to help the conference will be even better okay time is up I think we can