Hi all,
A while back (quite a while actually) I tried to start a
discussion about where we might have next year's GimpCon. There
were 2 main ideas - the first is to stage something more or less
standalone - 20 odd people turn up somewhere and talk about the
GIMP for 4 days. The second is to piggy-back on an existing
event, taking advantage of the organisation and financing of the
bigger event.
I asked for ideas of events, and offers to organise the location
for the 20 odd people. I also asked for proposals for dates.
Unfortunately, the response was less than I'd expected, which
means I probably didn't ask properly :)
Today a few of us were talking about this on IRC, and a couple of
concrete proposals came up. Well, more sandy-water proposals at
the moment...
1) Lyon
Myself and David Odin live here, we're both active in the local
LUG and might get some organisational help there, David works in
a university and has cleared the "in principle" issue with his
boss. We would have some rooms in a university, with access to
the university network, and probably guest accounts on the
university network. There has been no talk of money, so we don't
know how much all this access might cost.
Plus: Facilities
Minus: Lyon isn't easy to get to, which means higher transport
costs. Dates after the 25th of June are best.
2) GUADEC
The GNOME Users and Developers Conference is in the process of
organising itself for the last week in June; this is about the
time that I think it would be good to have a conference (around
the time 2.2 comes out), before we break lots of stuff doing a
gegl migration.
Plus: Everything will be organised. Lots of smart people around.
Minus: We're not a GNOME app, so we probably won't get travel
expenses paid by the organisers (we can always ask, though -
perhaps we can get a Graphics stream added, and have 4 or 5
people give presentations and get expenses that way). Again,
Norway's not easy to get to. If we are having problems getting
money, sponsorship might be tough (most people liable to sponsor
us will also probably be sponsoring GUADEC)
3) London
Sven knows some people in London who might be prepared to put in
the organisational effort.
Plus: London = cheap transport
Minus: We don't know what facilities will be available.
Other ideas (conferences we could hijack, or places where people
would be able to organise stuff for us) are welcome, as well as
comments on these.
Please note that I have not talked about money at all really...
IMHO, we need a someone who will handle the money, and a group of
someones who will look for sponsorship. The problem is that we
often need somebody, who could be anybody, but everybody thinks
somebody will do it, and in the end nobody ends up doing it :) So
it would be nice to start naming our somebodies now.
Cheers,
Dave.
--
David Neary,
Lyon, France
E-Mail: bolsh@xxxxxxxx
