Debian Conference 2015 The annual Debian developer meeting

DebConf15 press release, 4 August 2015

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DebConf15 — Debian Conference in Heidelberg

• 16th Debian conference, first time in Germany, 15–22 August 2015, Heidelberg
• Largest DebConf so far with more than 550 participants from 53 countries expected
• Open weekend on 15/16 August; only very few spaces left
• Renowned speakers to talk on subjects including cloud, security, and privacy, streamed in real-time to the Internet
• Conference website: http://debconf15.debconf.org
• Hashtag for social media: #DebConf15

Heidelberg, August 2015 — The international Debian conference DebConf will take place in Heidelberg, Germany from 15 to 22 August 2015. Volunteer developers and contributors from all over the world will come together to inform each other and the general public about progress and ongoing work and to engage in discussions and planning for future development. With more than 550 attendees from 53 countries, DebConf15 will be the largest DebConf so far.

At the start of the 8-day-conference, the organising team invites members of the public to an Open Weekend, to inform themselves about the Debian Project, its operating systems and the people behind them. More information about this weekend is available at http://debconf15.debconf.org/openweekend.xhtml. Registration is free of charge, but required via the website. Due to high demand, there are only very few spaces are left.

Visitors may expect presentations in English about the project, its community and its products. Preparations for the next release and technical topics will be supplemented with discussions around current topics relating to the Cloud, security, privacy and Free Software in general.

Featured speakers are:

• Bradley M. Kuhn, President of the Software Freedom Conservancy
• Werner Koch, Author of the GnuPG security software suite
• Bdale Garbee, Chief Technologist, Open Source and Linux at Hewlett Packard, and former Debian Project Leader
• Jacob Appelbaum, security expert and journalist
• Allison Randal, President, Open Source Initiative, and Distinguished Technologist, HP
• Peter Eckersly, Chief Computer Scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• John Sullivan, Executive Director, Free Software Foundation
• Jon maddog Hall, Executive Director of Linux International

On Saturday evening (15 August), attendees will celebrate the 22nd birthday of the Debian Project. The band bellsparx from Mannheim, who specialise in Free music, will be playing live.

Another highlight is the screening of Citizenfour on Friday evening (21 August). The film was awarded the Oscar for best documentary earlier this year, and the Debian Project is explicitly thanked in the movie end credits.

The rest of the week is packed with technical presentations, workshops and discussions that will be influential to Debian and the plans for the next version of the Debian family of operating systems.

The full conference programme is available from https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/

DebConf is of incredible importance to our community, says Debian Project Leader Neil McGovern. We work as volunteers around the clock from all parts of the world and personal interactions and friendships forged at DebConf have a noticeable impact on the quality of our work, and the motivation of all our contributors.

DebConf would not be possible without the support of numerous sponsors.

Platinum sponsor Hewlett-Packard and Debian have a long history of cooperation.

HP uses Debian to accelerate innovation for HP Helion and The Machine and it is the natural choice with its strong commitment to being universal operating system where HP and HP employees participate as part of the community, says Steve Geary, R&D manager at Hewlett-Packard. HP continues its long tradition of sponsoring DebConf as a venue where HP comes to share our ideas, hear others', and align technical paths for Debian as part of HP Helion and The Machine.

ENDS — additional details follow.

Please direct any questions or requests for further information to our press team at press@debconf.org or call +49 89 2155 0092 (during Central European working hours).

About Debian and DebConf

The Debian Project is an association of volunteer individuals who have made common cause to create an operating system comprised entirely of Free Software. Debian is used in numerous businesses, NGOs and the public sector world-wide. It serves as the basis of other GNU/Linux distributions, such as the popular Ubuntu, and Tails, the operating system in use e.g. by the journalists responsible for the NSA revelations.

DebConf has taken place every year since 2000 in a different country. Like the Debian Project, it is organised entirely by volunteers and run on a not-for-profit basis. Video streams of several presentations are made available in real-time and archived for public consumption. Apart from presentations and workshops, the conference goal includes providing space and infrastructure to attendees to collaborate and discuss.

Next year, DebConf16 is slated to take place in June/July in Cape Town, South Africa, for the first time on the African continent. Proposals for DebConf in 2017 are expected from Montreal/Canada, Cambridge/United Kingdom, Paris/France, Prague/Czech Republic and Karlskrona/Sweden.

Details and curiosa

Named DebConf15, this year's DebConf is actually the 16th DebConf, which curiously coincides with computer counting and indexing starting at 0. The number actually references the year, and the first DebConf in 2000 was DebConf0.

More visitors are expected this year than ever before, a challenge the organisers managed to rise to. For the first time in DebConf history, we have to consider to close down registrations due to the huge interest, says Martin Krafft, a long-time organiser, who's thankful to the venue for their support: The youth hostel has been extremely accomodating and their facilities make it an ideal partner for us. The cooperation with the staff has been pleasant and uncomplicated all along.

The biggest challenge was that the youth hostel's Internet connection was not suitable for the attendees' work and the video live-streaming. Fortunately, Project Elephant House solved this. Within a few months, the DebConf organisers, the youth hostel, the neighbouring zoo and the local university teamed up to connect the youth hostel to the university's network via the fibre connections installed throughout the zoo. It is planned to keep this connection alive beyond the conference.

Walter Tiefenbach, the leading technician at the Zoo, comments: Our zoo invested in future-proof infrastructure a while ago, primarily for our own digital content. We're very happy that the planned use of our link by the youth hostel confirms these far-sighted decisions. We're looking forward to cooperating with the hostel and the university.

The youth hostel operators, Martina and Andreas Rihm, are very pleased with the development. Thanks to the DebConf organisers, we managed to approach this project in a short time. The collaboration with zoo and university with the support by the DebConf team was very fruitful. In the future, our guests are going to be able to buy zoo tickets at check-in time. And we're now also one of the youth hostels in the state of Baden-Württemberg with the fastest Internet connection.