Debian Conference 2015 The annual Debian developer meeting

DebConf15: Farewell, and thanks for all the Fisch

A week ago, we concluded our biggest DebConf ever! It was a huge success.

We are overwhelmed by the positive feedback, for which we’re very grateful. We want to thank you all for participating in the talks; speakers and audience alike, in person or live over the global Internet — it wouldn’t be the fantastic DebConf experience without you!

Many of our events were recorded and streamed live, and are now available for viewing, as are the slides and photos.

To share a sense of the scale of what all of us accomplished together, we’ve compiled a few statistics:

• 555 attendees from 52 countries (including 28 kids)
• 216 scheduled events (183 talks and workshops), of which 119 were streamed and recorded
• 62 sponsors and partners
• 169 people sponsored for food and accommodation
• 79 professional and 35 corporate registrations

Our very own designer Valessio Brito made a lovely video of impressions and images of the conference.

We’re collecting impressions from attendees as well as links to press articles, including Linux Weekly News coverage of specific sessions of DebConf. If you find something not yet included, please help us by adding links to the wiki.

We tried a few new ideas this year, including a larger number of invited and featured speakers than ever before.

On the Open Weekend, some of our sponsors presented their career opportunities at our job fair, which was very well attended.

And a diverse selection of entertainment options provided the necessary breaks and ample opportunity for socialising.

On the last Friday, the Oscar-winning documentary “Citizenfour” was screened, with some introductory remarks by Jacob Appelbaum and a remote address by its director, Laura Poitras, and followed by a long Q&A session by Jacob.

DebConf15 was also the first DebConf with organised childcare (including a Teckids workshop for kids of age 8-16), which our DPL Neil McGovern standardised for the future: “it’s a thing now,” he said.

The participants used the week before the conference for intensive work, sprints and workshops, and throughout the main conference, significant progress was made on Debian and Free Software. Possibly the most visible was the endeavour to provide reproducible builds, but the planning of the next stable release “stretch” received no less attention. Groups like the Perl team, the diversity outreach programme and even DebConf organisation spent much time together discussing next steps and goals, and hundreds of commits were made to the archive, as well as bugs closed.

DebConf15 was an amazing conference, it brought together hundreds of people, some oldtimers as well as plenty of new contributors, and we all had a great time, learning and collaborating with each other, says Margarita Manterola of the organiser team, and continues: The whole team worked really hard, and we are all very satisfied with the outcome. Another organiser, Martin Krafft adds: We mainly provided the infrastructure and space. A lot of what happened during the two weeks was thanks to our attendees. And that’s what makes DebConf be DebConf.

Our organisation was greatly supported by the staff of the conference venue, the Jugendherberge Heidelberg International, who didn’t take very long to identify with our diverse group, and who left no wishes untried. The venue itself was wonderfully spacious and never seemed too full as people spread naturally across the various conference rooms, the many open areas, the beergarden, the outside hacklabs and the lawn.

The network installed specifically for our conference in collaboration with the nearby university, the neighbouring zoo, and the youth hostel provided us with a 1 Gbps upstream link, which we managed to almost saturate. The connection will stay in place, leaving the youth hostel as one with possibly the fastest Internet connection in the state.

And the kitchen catered high-quality food to all attendees and their special requirements. Regional beer and wine, as well as local specialities, were provided at the bistro.

DebConf exists to bring people together, which includes paying for travel, food and accomodation for people who could not otherwise attend. We would never have been able to achieve what we did without the support of our generous sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsor Hewlett-Packard. Thank you very much.

See you next year in Cape Town, South Africa!

TecKids @ DebConf: Register Until Tuesday

We are happy to announce that TecKids, a non-profit specialising in working with kids, teaching them technonology, and fostering self-sustaining communities amongst them, will be holding a workshop from 15.08. to 18.08.

The focus is on kids aged 10-15 years old, but kids aged 8-16 years old are welcome to attend if they can follow the course without supervision of theirs parents.

Admission is free of charge, but registration through TecKids’ web form is mandatory. Registration is open until Tuesday, 11 August.

The rough schedule for now is:

• robotics
• game programming
• Arduino

You will be kept up to date on any changes to the schedule and other details by the TecKids team after registration. It is important that you check mail before heading to DebConf in order to receive any last-minute informations.

DebConf15 registrations temporarily closed due to immense popularity

The interest to participate in DebConf15, which will start in 10 days, has been overwhelming. Thank you so much!

We planned the conference for 350 people and we now expect more than 570. This is fantastic and a wonderful support and encouragement for Debian and its contributors. But we are getting to the point where we have to prioritise considerations about the capacity of the venue and the safety of our attendees.

We’ve therefore had to close registrations until we have evaluated further options for accomodating even more attendees. For those of you who did not register for DebConf on time, but still want to participate, please bear with us and make sure to check back soon.

DebConf15 Schedule Published and Additional Featured Speakers Announced

DebConf15 Schedule

The DebConf content team is pleased to announce the schedule of DebConf15, the forthcoming Debian Developers Conference. From a total of nearly 100 talk submissions, the team selected 75 talks. Due to the high number of submissions, several talks had to be shortened to 20 minute slots, of which a total of 30 talks have made it to the schedule.

In addition, around 50 meetings and discussions (BoFs) have been submitted so far, as well as several other events like lightning talk sessions, live demos, a movie screening, a poetry night or stand-up comedy.

The Schedule is available online at the DebConf15 conference site.

Further changes to the schedule can and will be made, but today’s announcement represents the first stable version.

Featured Speakers

In addition to the previously announced invited speakers, the content team also announces the following list of additional featured speakers:

• Allison Randal, President, Open Source Initiative and Distinguished Technologist, HP: “Philosophy of Free Software”
• Peter Eckersley, Chief Computer Scientist, Electronic Frontier Foundation: “Let’s Encrypt”
• John Sullivan, Executive Director, Free Software Foundation: “Debian and the FSF: Ending disagreements by solving problems at the source”
• Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, Executive Director, Linux International: “Two contests, no waiting!”

The full list of invited and featured speakers, including the invited speakers profiles and the titles of their talks is available here.

Striving for more diversity at DebConf15

DebConf is not just for Debian Developers, we welcome all members of our community active in different areas, like translation, documentation, artwork, testing, specialized derivatives, and many other ways that help make Debian better.

In fact, we would like to open DebConf to an even broader audience, and we strongly believe that more diversity at DebConf and in the Debian community will significantly help us towards our goal of becoming the Universal Operating System.

The DebConf team is proud to announce that we have started designing a specific diversity sponsorship programme to attract people to DebConf that would otherwise not consider attending our conference or not be able to join us.

In order to apply for this special sponsorship, please write an email to outreach@debian.org, before July 6th, about your interest in Debian and your sponsorship needs (accomodation, travel). Please include a sentence or two about why you are applying for a Diversity Sponsorship. You can also nominate people you think should be considered for this sponsorship programme.

Please feel free to send this announcement on to groups or individuals that could be interested in this sponsorship programme.

And we’re also looking forward to your feedback. We’re just getting started and you can help shape these efforts.